But That Was In Another Country
by Guardian1
Summary: Sometimes the good guys don't win against unstoppable odds. Yuffie Kisaragi and the last stand: before Traverse Town, there was the Planet, and before Sora, there was AVALANCHE.
1. i: and when the sun descended

**But That Was In Another Country**

* * *

_Foreword, by Yuffie Kisaragi_

* * *

Squall Leonhart is a gigantic gaping asshole. They have his picture next to 'gigantic gaping asshole' in the dictionary.

What?

* * *

When she asks me 'what happened?' it's a dumb question, because a. there's too much to cover and b. I don't _know_. It's also a case of me trying to swallow the whole damn thing inside me like it was an organ I'd misplaced, or something, something red and _internal_ - I mean, just look at Cid, he took to comfort food so quick when we got to Traverse Town you could hardly say _fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches are not for eating!_. I mean it. He started _stuffing_. I mean, I know he was trying to quit smoking, but _boy_ did he ever jump All Aboard The Grease Train in the attempt. I think that his first option was to smoke himself dead but his lungs were already ninety-nine percent tar and absorbed arsenic to breathe, and then it was liquor but he knows that he's the meanest damn drunk Omni ever put breath into, so I think after that it was _hot sex_ or _food_. Since nobody with a brain cell would ever sleep with Cid Highwind, he started on the bacon sandwiches and lard in his tea. (Well, not the lard, though Aerith kept on suggesting it, so he could be like that butterball Palmer.)

Okay. Okay. I'm already going off topic. I know it's hard being as _charmingly ebullient_ as I am. (Ebullient is a great word, isn't it. I think it's my favourite word now. Ebullient ebullient ebullient. Ebullient ebullient ebullient. I think the charm is wearing off ebullient ebullient ebullient.)

Okay.

_What happened._

I mean, she asks me that, and I'm kind of _surprised_, because if anyone should know what went on I thought it would be Aerith Gainsborough. One degree of separation from angels, that kind of shit. _Previously expired_. Ex-dead. Nearer my god to thee, you know the drill. The first time I started all falteringly going on about Sephiroth, ten million years of my young life lost fighting Tonberries in the Northern Crater, the long stupid laundry list of who died and who didn't, she bopped me on the nose very gently with one finger and said she knew all _that_ stuff already. Which meant she wanted to know the _other_ stuff, which just all-out _sucked_ because I wasn't quite over that stuff yet and had hoped it'd been covered under the broad parasol of her omnipotence. I don't think I'll ever be quite over it. I don't think I'm ready.

Well, that was basically it, wasn't it? I wasn't ready to tell her. I _ummed_ and _awwed_ until I claimed I needed to go pee, and then I escaped out the window and went to find Leon who'd be out patrolling town and killing Heartless and re-tousling his hair or something, and she didn't say a word about it. Not once. Not ever. No pressure. Everything coming up roses.

So, of course, I got guiltier and guiltier and guiltier and _guiltier_ about it, and I've been sitting in the Red Room drumming my heels on the wall and thinking about how to say it, and scribbling little bits of things on pieces of paper. You kind of have to approach it in a ninja way to think about it; you rush it head-on, it grabs you around the head in a headlock and you weep on the floor like a baby. You have to edge up behind it and sit on it before it can run away, really prep yourself, because it's like fires and knives and whippings. Squall, he tortures himself with it; he ties himself to the bed with no safeword and _flays_ himself with it.

Me? I pretend it never went down.

Which is basically sticking my finger in their eyes. We all tried so hard and it was so _unfair_, we'd already done it once, we were ready to do it twice and we _couldn't_. I don't know if we lead charmed lives or what: maybe we got fat, maybe we got tired, maybe we got lazy. I don't know what we got but we _got_ it. I'm sorry, Tifa. I'm sorry, Barret. I'm sorry, Marlene. I'm sorry, Reeve. I'm sorry, Dad, you horrible senile jerkwad. I light incense for you, if it makes you feel better, they got this kind of church thing here though I still can't see Huey, Duey and Luey without wanting to shit myself laughing, I offer wine and Vinnie, I'm so so _so damn sorry you can have all my materia every single bit if it makes it all better -_

And I -

I, I just -

Okay.

Here's what happened.

* * *

**i.** _and when the sun descended and the night arose_

* * *

Cloud was basically crazy, so when he first apparently started talking about killing the dark things I put it down to him being a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty and kind of made the cuckoo-cuckoo spinny motion around my ear. I mean, you had to face the fact that he was a few branches short of a tree and only Tifa could make any sense out of him, so unless he was plotting Reunion and growing his hair out I didn't see why we had to _worry_. He'd been that way ever since he had a proper sit-down to realize that basically everything in his life was a lie and his One True Flowergirl was dead and he was filled with bits of a dead alien, and he was always going to be that way, so no panicking needed. So he's crazy! Awesome! I can ask him for money! What's the problem!

Then he started seeing things out of the corners of his eyes. Tifa wrote in her letters to me: _Cloud's seeing shadows_, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist (why do they use that term, anyway? Shera wouldn't know crap from crap if it didn't have engines attached) to translate that as _Cloud is bugfuck and will soon need adult diapers_. I didn't pack my crap up and kick my dad goodbye because I was worried about Cloud's creepy-crazy shadows; I went to give Tifa a hand because he was impossible to handle by himself. She wouldn't have asked it. Tifa was Tifa. But what with the bar and Marlene having vengeance on the local Kalm school bully by breaking his arm (look, the kid wanted self-defence, me and Cid didn't think that if we taught her a couple moves she'd go busting the body of the lunch boy) and _everything_ along with Cloud being a clod, I hop-skipped it over.

(It had totally nothing to do with the fact that Godo the Tardnificent and I had one of our legendary screaming matches again and I had been disowned for the third time that year. My dad and I could have argued about monkey livers. Or shoes.)

It was winter. I remember the winter. I still hate winter now. I caught the first snowflakes on my tongue all the way to Eighth Heaven, three scarves and a bustling bar with blasting fan heaters, Tifa Lockhart's hair scraped all chocolate-dark over her sweaty forehead as she bit her lip and stirred martinis. I remember slamming the door with a clatter to keep the heat in, shaking snow off myself, and the bartender turning to give me the sort of lit-up smile that launched a thousand submarines. Women beautiful like Tifa don't come too often. When they do all you want to do is look at them, over and over again, which may account for the reason as to why she sold a shitload of drinks.

"_Yuffie!_"

I was immediately almost squashed to death by Barret, who had been alerted by Tifa's cry, who pulled me into him and crushed my vertebrae with his gun-arm and noogied me with the other. There are pros and cons about being buds with a burly black man. Tifa vaulted over the bar and, rather than saving me from the gunner's painful love display, doubleteamed me from behind in the kind of hug where you all just kind of press close and rock from side to side like morons.

"How'd you make it through this storm?" the martial artist scolded me. "You should have PHSed us, I would have told you to stay _put_ - "

"So why did you think I didn't PHS you? Duh."

"Jes' look at you," Barret rumbled, messing my hair about more in a way that rocked my skull and destroyed my brain tissue. I attempted to headbutt his fingers. "You're goddamn _growed_."

"I'm not, I'm still a b-cup - gawd, Barret, STOP that, I'm getting a skull fracture here." (He let go. I rearranged my destroyed hair, elbowing both judiciously in the process until they moved slightly away from our erotic cuddling sandwich.) "So you guys happy to see me or what? Where's Marls? I'm _freezing_, where's the booze?" ("At the bar when you can prove to me you're eighteen," said Tifa.) "Where's Cloud?"

They gave each other a Look over my head that could have been anything, from _Cloud is frothing merrily in his bedroom_ or _Cloud mistook the milkman for Sephiroth again_. Barret sucked in a breath and then turned it into a disgusted snort, even as Tifa pursed her lips and shook her head. "Barret, don't start - "

"In his room again. Sleepin'." (Not the milkman, then.) "All he ever goddamn does, when he's not pullin' himself around kickin' corners. That jackass. Me, I'm gonna shake him till his teeth rattle in his damn-fool head."

"Barret, please - "

"Makes me so fuckin' _furious!_" He illustrated this by slamming his arm down on the nearest table, making the coasters on it clink alarmingly in the aftershock, coalblack eyes gleaming from the swinging lamps overhead. "Tiff, stop coverin' up for that lazy selfish streak'a bullshit - "

"Not today. _Please_. Not with Yuffie here and everything."

"It's cool! I like dysfunction."

" - wall-eyed, stuck-up, shit-fer-brains - "

"Barret Wallace!"

" - whinin', mewlin', pukin' _bitch_ - "

"Barret," she said. "I miss him too, you idiot."

It stopped him mid-invective; the big man sort of _slumped_, the anger seeping away, eyes closing as if he was suddenly very tired and old. Barret was big and solid and indestructible, dark-gleaming, the powerhouse: to see him _old_ always made parts of me jolt in deep disquiet. He opened his mouth as if he was going to say something else, but promptly shut it when he thought better. I was slightly disappointed because I had been learning new words, but I made an attempt at charm by punching his arm.

"Let it lie, dude," I said. "The man's gaga, it's not like _Tiffers_ doesn't know that most of all of us."

"Thanks tons being the voice of sweetness and sensitivity, Miss Kisaragi," she said dryly, but she took me in her arms again and pressed her cheek to mine and held me as though I might break. She smelled like sweat and soap, like perfume, like chalk and resin and alcohol. "You sit down and warm up and I'll get you something to drink, okay?"

"Whiskey?"

She gave me a long, appraising look. "Grape knee-high."

Barret guffawed appreciatively as he flopped back into his chair. I sulked. Being sixteen just totally _sucked_.

* * *

You had to watch Cloud hard to ascertain that he was crazy. You had to watch Cloud hard to ascertain that he was _there_. If he wasn't sleeping in his bed - still, stiff like a corpse, above the blankets, usually in all of his clothes - he would sit by the window, close to the wall, curtains barely twitching as he stared out into the wasteland for something that I couldn't quite comprehend. He'd just stare. He wouldn't move. He'd sit still as if moving meant something worse than death - as if not moving was part of some plan, part of some penance, not discipline so much as code. If he sat very still something would happen. Or something wouldn't happen. I never could tell. He moved like there were nails through his eyelids and fingernails, through his mouth, like life was some big razorblade. The same slow deliberation a Tonberry came at you, like - oh, well, hell, he was just _nuts nuts nuts_, not frothing but _simmering_. If he was lucid, it was total accident, like the marble rolling in one of those cheap bump games where you have to get it into a hollow the depth of a frog pore. The marble rolled in, the marble teetered, the marble rolled the hell out.

A man's not crazy-go-nuts if he just sits in a chair and looks out a window. He's crazy-go-nuts if he can sit there for three hours at a time without twitching. _I cannot sit still for five minutes_. (This is how you can tell I am sane.)

He wasn't sleeping; Cloud was by the window, in a chair that looked like it had been welded to a certain angle by the wall, with that sort of rumpled and unshaven look you get when you roll out of bed. He looked like he'd never stopped just rolling out of bed. It was not so much sexy _just got out of bed wanna go back_ so much as _just got out of bed and my clothes are becoming part of my skin_. I wanted to cartwheel in, sit on the bed and shriek like a pony: instead, I crept down by him, and put my chin on the windowsill, and watched his knuckles as he stared out into the snow.

"Cloud," I said.

He said nothing.

"Cloo-_ooud_."

He said nothing. The weather was like a radio with bad reception; fluffy snow, so that you couldn't see much, just flakes drifting in the deepening dusk and lengthening the shadows to dye them blue. I squinted; people were inside and they sure as hell didn't want to come out. The lights of Kalm burnt sulfurous yellow squares on the cloudy cobbles.

"There's not much out there, Cloud."

It came out so much like a sigh, lungs-expelling, that I just about jumped out of my skin: there was silence in that room. It would eat your shoes. "The alleyway. Left of the generator. Eight o'clock."

I eyeballed it. The alleyway was hung about with blue shadows, the same like the rest of Kalm, empty and black and still. There was nothing malevolent. There was only the dark. I liked the dark. I had always liked the dark. I'm a sunshine kind of girl, but I'm a _ninja_, and you can't fear what butters your bread. It was just the dark, it was just the shadows, it was just the gloaming: it was nothing.

"Yeah, I hate those killer alleyways. I hear they're a big problem here, Spike. I could go take it out for you."

"You can't see it." It was statement, not question.

"Sure I can see it. It's an alleyway."

He looked at me - which involved moving his head, which was always a good sign - as if he hadn't really thought of me before; something cleared in the shifting turmoil of his mako-eyes, and it was greeting. Some kind of greeting, anyway. I would have preferred it if he'd gotten pissed with me. Even Vincent would have gotten po-faced by now. "Were there monsters on the road?"

"It's pissing snow. Not as many as usual. I just had to worry about my pretty face freezing off."

He went back to looking. His sword was beside him, I noticed: still and sharp and cool, just another prop in the bizarre tableau. "I thought so. They're afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"Afraid of the darkness."

I poked his hip. The blonde seemed lean, bonier than usual, but still as alert: too much alert, too much coffee, and all he did when I poked him was to close his eyes a little. "We are totally here for you if you have a loco weed problem. There's a twelve-step program and everything. Hospices. Burly nurses. You just have to admit you have a problem."

"A problem? Probably."

I never expected much from him, but getting more than silence was always nice. It was still a pretty dumb conversation. "I think your problem is you're _crazy_."

"Yeah," Cloud agreed simply, eyes still on the alleyway; his voice was a dry husk that sounded like it knew words but wasn't really on friendly terms with them, and wouldn't invite them out on a date or anything. His whole life, his whole sightline, was between the dark strip of those two buildings. "But not blind."

I bounced to my feet, knees elastic, rocking back and forth on my heels. "You should take a shower, you know. Or brush your hair. Or change into fresh clothes. Or clean your teeth. Or shave. All of these things are good starts."

All he did was keep staring out the window. The answer to me was clear: he did not want to start, there was nothing to begin.

"You could come to dinner. That would be awesome. You do that."

"Tell Tifa I'm not hungry." Sexy ninjas had piqued his interest all the pique-ing they were going to do; it was pure dismissal, and I began to really see why Tifa would sit in the kitchen with her head buried in her hands as Barret awkwardly tried to rub her back.

"You could do a striptease." Silence. He'd said his goodbyes; I walked backwards out the room, everything all still again, that horrible unreal stillness like he was in a picture and the picture was a picture. I was suddenly furious. Tifa was frying chicken; Tifa's fried chicken could be smelled from a mile off. Only creepy people and Cloud Strife would not come down for fried chicken. Dead people could be hungry for her cooking. (Proof: Vincent Valentine would stop wallowing for her potato salad.) "You could - you could - gawd, I dunno, you could _die_, Cloud Strife. I don't think anyone would notice."

I don't think he even heard me. I should have given him a dead arm. It was _so much more_ than fried chicken.

* * *

Here's the secret. Don't tell anyone. It's a downright biggie: but I loved my father, I loved him from his toes to his receding hairline, I loved him so hard I could have done a totally retarded stomping dance to try to demonstrate it. I mean, yeah, we had our differences, his brain was slowly shrinking and he was way senile, but I _loved him_.

We'd never really been family, though. I mean, yeah, he was my Dad, he was Godo, not much could change that except a time machine and ostensibly some pretty quick talking to my mother. But he hadn't brought me _up_. Nobody brought me up. I brought me up. My ten dozen cats brought me up. The mountains of Da Chao brought me up. I had no ties, I had no knit: and then AVALANCHE came along, and that was that. I fit right into a slot that had always been ready for Cloud to come across me in that forest, all cocked eyebrows and beating the shit out of me (I let them). There I was. Thief. Little sister. The _loud_ one. The baby.

They all taught me. We all taught each other. I taught Cid how to tie cherry stems in two with his tongue. (And totally wished I hadn't.) Tifa taught me how to not make noodles, or, if I made noodles, how not to make them taste like how my noodles had previously tasted. She also taught me how to break somebody's neck cleaner, as my technique was kinda off. (Vincent, to the side, suddenly and very quietly recommended a thing you did with your two fingers.) I taught Cloud how to make a hamster's eyes fall out, if he ever got a hold of a hamster, and just for me at the Gold Saucer (okay, more for Aerith, who was standing admiring with clasped hands right beside him) he scored ten thousand points on the racing game and obediently gave me a tub of goo from the prize rack. That was pretty good goo.

Aerith taught me how to pluck my eyebrows. Then she showed me how to spit peach pits so you could hit a can with them. It just goes to show, I think.

But yeah, I remember - I will always remember - sitting in Tifa Lockheart's steamed-up kitchen, around her little table, Barret a crowd all by himself with her cooking fried chicken and everything close and _home_. It was home. _They_ were home. Marlene with her fat short pigtails up top on her head: she drummed her palms on the table, very serious at five years old. Then again, she knew more than other five year olds, and always had, like how to mix a good martini.

"_Yo!_" she cried out. "Yuffie, Yuffie, we did painting in school today and - "

"_Mar-lene,_" her father thundered. "What're you thinkin', usin' language like _that?_ What're you gonna do when you _git_ somewhere?"

"Sorry, Papa," she said, immediately contrite.

"That's my girl." Barret ruffled her pigtails until her hair stood up and she looked like she had a mutant mohawk. "_Yo!_ Tifa! You need any help there - "

I pulled my chair around and pressed myself up against the back of it, half-listening as the little girl told me in tones of deep import about painting chicobos or whatever the hell it was she had painted, Tifa's old t-shirt (my stuff was in the wash) all soft worn cotton on my skin. Baggy soft worn cotton, since Tifa had attributes I hadn't got and never would, except with the help of plastic surgery or stuffing. Barret had bigger man-boobs than I did.

Marlene said something; I swung my head around in distraction so that my lengthening hair whipped at my cheeks. "Yeah? No, no, I never had to do the alphabet in Wutai. We don't do the alphabet. We learn how to beat people up. And we don't have to do arithmetic."

Her big dark eyes grew _huge_ as she thought that sucker over. "But you gotta do 'rithmetic."

"Why?"

"So you can maths up bar tabs."

"And what are bar tabs?" Tifa asked triumphantly as she set down the platter of fried chicken, smacking my hand with her oven mitt as I attempted to relieve the closest piece of its skin. Her low husky alto joined in with Marlene's piping soprano as they both yelled at each other: "'_Bar tabs are an excuse for bumming drinks!_'"

"What you gone and tole my daughter?" Barret growled, smacking his gun arm on the table for emphasis until the soup rattled for punctuation. It sounded like a long-rehearsed, family-incomprehensible exchange.

"Momma Tifa tells me about _life_," his adopted daughter argued importantly.

She just drew herself up to her full height, all mock-disdain, taking on a fair approximation of the darkskinned man's lilt as she grabbed the tongs. "I teach her thangs a momma needs to teach a Marlene, Barret Wallace."

"You sure are good at it fer an itty-bitty girl with a butt like a butterbean," the gunner said, and it was tenderness, all husky and low and unbearably warm and I looked at Tifa's laughing eyes and thought for the first time: _ooooh, shit._

She broke the spell, gave me a bowl, and shook her rapidly disassembling ponytail over her shoulder to glance in my direction. Tifa even looked hot with her hair exploded. It was so desperately unfair. "Did you go up and see him, Yuff?"

The Him had an unseen capital H on it, smack dab in front just from the saying. I grabbed a fork and pressed my sock feet to the floor, so that I could feel the thrum of the dehumidifyer fighting with the heater as we all breathed in wet heat. "Yeah. Does he do the 'in the alleyway sleeps an evil' routine on you? Jeez, I had half a mind to grab my materia and cast Bolt on him until it shook him back to Sanity Road."

Tifa had to deftly put a drumstick on Barret's plate before he opened his mouth to deliver another blistering rant on the subject. "We know about the alleyway. Honestly. I mean, him and I, we went down there together yesterday morning, crunched in the snow for a whole hour and there was nothing there. Not a thing. He gets agitated about it. Really worried. It's serious this time. He woke me up at three in the morning yesterday and told me to get Premium Heart ready. It's just - nothing like _this_ has happened before."

"It's a cat," Barret said, vitriol made indistinct via a mouthful of fried chicken. "S'a goddamned cat."

"It's not a cat. He's _Cloud,_ damn it. He can tell the difference between a cat and what he thinks is a threat."

"Don't say yer _defendin'_ him - "

"I'm saying he's _seeing things._ I'm saying that's _worse_." Thin-lipped, she spooned out salad. "Reeve has a doctor in Junon he wants Cloud to see, but that's the last thing he needs. No more pills. No more bad medicine. No weird therapy. All he needs is - is us."

It was a kind way of saying _all he needs is me_ which was probably the real scenario, because Tifa damn near wiped his ass, and even so she was the only one who probably really treated him like a human being. She was _saint_. It wasn't all altruistic: _we are all atoning,_ like Vin would've said, but she loved him and that was real. I really thought that all he needed was to be beat up until candy came out.

Barret gave a grunt. (It was only later I learnt that Barret was the one who spent every waking moment with him that Tifa couldn't, that Barret was the one who punched him around the head when Cloud was going through bad moments, the hulking orderly to Tifa's nurse.) "I'm gonna go up and sit with him tonight. Hell, I'll shoot up that f... _friggin'_ alleyway if it'll make Spike happy. Neighbours call ag'in, I'll tell 'em it went off accidental-like. Askin'! _Damn!_ Fools, back in Midgar when someone let loose a couple rounds into plain ol' brick wall, you jest shut up'n _didn't ask._"

"They like their brick walls here," the brunette said tiredly, and she passed Marlene the teapot so that the five-year-old could deftly and solemnly pour us all hot sweet tea. "They have a thing about them. They worry more about whether we shovel snow than about you putting a couple of rounds into them."

"That's 'cause they don't know what's good for 'em!"

"Your domestic life is totally fascinating," I said, sucking crispy chicken skin down my greedy gullet. "And by fascinating I mean way frightening."

"I gotta have a new coat," Marlene announced, apparently finding this a good interval to need a new coat.

Her father was still glaring at the salt cellar like he could explode it with Power from his Eyes, which I was pretty sure he could if he just tried a little harder. The world is so full of miracles. "Eat yer greens. What happened to the ol' coat?"

"It gotta big hole, Papa," she replied, a trifle evasively.

"Huh! My girl gotta have a new coat, then!" There was about twenty seconds' worth of gladsome crunching from all concerned, me trying to bite my chicken down to the bone as I only half-noticed that Tifa was only really eating the salad, before Barret wiped his mouth ("Use a napkin, Barret!" "Woman, I ain't saved the world jes' to use a damn _napkin_" "I haven't saved it either to watch you spot up my table!") and eyed the five-year-old a little more suspiciously. "Now, where dat big hole come from?"

"Rho Harpe's head. I was trying to snooch him and he wouldn't die."

Well, from then on, it was dinner theater. It was better than sports. Enraptured, I watched both Barret and Tifa bear down on Marlene like a freight train as she hotly protested the undying and ferocious evil force that was Rho Harpe, which left me time to sneak bits of chicken from the tray and eat them before anyone could protest. The final exhausted consensus ten minutes later was that if you were going to snooch someone, which you weren't going to anyway because violence was wrong, you would snooch someone with your two bare hands rather than waste a coat, not that you should ever raise a fist to anyone ever but why waste clothing with wear and tear left in it? Fightin' was _wrong_, Marlene's father contested, and anyone who said otherwise could come see him so's he could smack their fool head around. That sadly derailed the argument because it caused Tifa to put her head in her hands and laugh until she ached and she claimed that she could very well throw up if they continued talking, so that was that.

I was (almost) sorry I'd eaten so much chicken; Tifa brought out a still-warm lemon sugar pie as yellow as Command materia and so sweet it made my eyes roll back up into my head, and Barret and I somehow found room to consume ginormous wedges of it and sit back groaning. I was full and warm and totally contented, in a good mood with the world, and so happy I was just about to volunteer to do the dishes. (Doing dishes is always best when you don't _have_ to do them. Also, have you ever seen Barret trying to do dishes? I figured I would have to do it for the good of the city. Saint Yuffie the Awesome.)

Except just as I was totally about to, _really_, Tifa's dark head shot up so that the ponytail gave up the ghost and her hair shivered down her back in glossy chocolate-black waves. The night was quiet and the snow muffled all the sound: except for one, two parts the loud teeth-clenching tin of metal scraped on brick, most parts Tifa's Strifedar as she rose to her feet and disappeared from the kitchen to run to the back door. There was a pause; and then there was her pulling on her shoes and her coat, and of our chairs scraping as Barret'n me rose to our feet - Marls was such a good girl, she didn't even need to be told to stay put - as we chased after her.

(Tifa always _knew_; a sort of invisible cord connected him and her, or maybe just her to him, which meant she could hear the Buster Sword before he'd even taken that two-ton monster in both hands. Also Cloud's boots were gone and generally that meant Cloud was in them which kinda makes for a no-brainer.)

We crunched out into the snow, me sticking my hand through the wrong arm in my jacket and Barret not even bothering to put one on: the noise grew louder, unmistakeably a swordfight. I don't know what the hell I expected. Cloud vs. White-Haired Hobo, maybe. Cloud vs. The Alleyway. I didn't know why Tifa stopped in the mouth of it, dead still, as if frozen: but then I did, then I looked over her shoulder, and it was there. I never expected that.

It was so dark that you only thought he was fighting eight pairs of moving, idiotically staring yellow eyes, hot and gold, froglike and blank. It was so dark - almost unnaturally dark - that Cloud was all you could see, face half-covered with his scarf, Buster Sword a whisper-soft gleam as he decapitated one. There were no hot parts to roll into the snow; it was sort of like a bubble bursting, a melting, an explosion-implosion. They were horrible. They moved like - like groping insects, like flightless jumping-bees. Ants. All those hive minds. Feelers. They were searching for something, and Cloud was their prey: it was only later that I learned they wanted his hot, angry heart. One. Two. He cut down three - and then another - and then Tifa shifted forward to punt one who moved too close wholesale, like a ball, it squirming all the way until Cloud cleaved it in midair. Again, the dark swampy _pop_, and then there was nobody in the alleyway. Just Cloud. And me. And Tifa. And Barret. And the dead guy behind Cloud that they'd gotten to first, still quietly dissolving into black black goo with his chest clean open. Five.

"Everyone inside," he said, and he pulled his scarf down around his neck, frighteningly lucid and mako eyes ablaze. "Everyone inside with every light on in the house. Pack. Take only what we need to survive. Get your weapons. No chocobos. The less warm blood we carry the better. We have to go _now_."

And those were my first Heartless.

* * *

I won't say that they struck fear into my poor ickle ninja heart. They didn't. I stood there gaping, just like Tifa and Barret were gaping, more at first at _Wow! Cloud's not fighting a postbox he mistook for Sephiroth!_ than the Things. My first thought was in fact that they looked pretty retarded. They had short, pudgy little bodies, and round heads, and gleaming little golden-button eyes. They had curly feelers. They had long awkward claws on the ends of their ungainly hands. They were like toddlers, basically blind, making you want to sit on them just to see if they'd squish.

And then, when I was packing back all my stuff (_ninety-nine throwing stars stuffed in my bag, ninety-nine throwing stars stuffed: you take one down, pass it around, ninety-eight throwing stars still left to pack_) into my knapsack as everybody argued in the corridors with handheld torches and dented cans of food, I thought: they had short, pudgy little bodies, and round heads, and gleaming little golden-button eyes, and curly feelers, and little nubby claws, and they were clawing and grasping and launching themselves at Cloud like he was a spiky blonde buffet. They were consumers. They were mindless predators. The little shits could jump like frogs. And there were so _many_, and they fought as if they were used to many, they fought as if they were used to more. It didn't matter that they had big stupid-looking feet. And they moved in that liquid darkness as if it was the sea, as if it was the sky, as if it was the last encroaching thing that would ever matter.

So I wasn't afraid then.

But later I realized I sure as shit should have been.


	2. ii: into the setting sun

**But That Was In Another Country**

* * *

**ii. **_if i look hard enough into the setting sun_

* * *

It was only when we were a couple miles away, moving to the forest and out of the flatlands, that Tifa really realised what she was doing. It was four in the morning: she slammed her foot down on the brake in the truck - jolting me and Barret around in the back something ferocious - Cloud skimming in the grey sleet on his motorbike as she opened the door and leapt out. (This is not good Truck Safety, especially when you consider we had all the extra petrol in the back. And _me_, which is the main thing.) Her eyes were huge and her fingers were shaking. Marlene was asleep in the front seat belted up doubly over like a mental patient, and Tifa stared back at the dark city wringing her ungloved hands all the while.

"Get back in the car," Cloud said. (Me in the back of the truck didn't have to squint through the glare of the headlights to see his face: he was about as comforting as a kick in the head.)

"How the hell could we have been so selfish?" Her voice was muffled by the snow, and the nearby sea, everything cold and cool and forever. "How the hell could we have been so _blind?_ There's children back there. God, there's _children!_ What if more come - "

"More _are_ coming. That's why we're leaving."

The look that Tifa gave him totally emasculated winter until the end of time. It was so cold it came out the other side of the spectrum and thawed things. "And we warned _nobody_. We've left all those people there to die."

"There was no time."

"There's _always_ time!"

"Tiff," Barret said, and it was low and quiet and obscenely guilty rumble, "look, honeychile, we'll jes' get Marlene somewhere safe-like, then we'll come back and kick us some shadowy ass - "

"We're not coming back."

"Shut it wit' the _fuckin' mouth_, Strife."

What came out of Tifa's chapped lips was a snarl. Her hair was all knotted up and there was a horrible carrot-coloured scarf around her neck, and her bulky jacket covered her muscles so that she was turned from Punch Kick Hellacious Death Queen to Willowy Runway Model, and I totally could have pissed myself at that sound. "Don't 'honey' me, Barret Wallace. I can't believe we've been so _arrogant_. AVALANCHE my ass. Cloud, give me your motorcycle, and this _isn't_ a request. You turn me down and you'll _wish_ you were still back there - "

He kicked off the ground to pull up alongside her, long legs off his bike, turning towards the city - a blot away in the distance - without even gesturing. He still moved like he was a glass figurine, stiffly, unwilling, his motorbike louder and gassier and more emotive than he was. "It's too late. It's already begun."

We all looked: for a moment the horizon was just as it ever had been, dark and clear like a picture, the wind whipping up snow every so often straight into our faces like blue whiplash. And then, just like the edge of a piece of paper when it catches alight, there were sparks: just like flashes, foxfire, unmistakable Fire and not just _fire_ with the little f, the house at the end of the street ablaze. Tifa was suddenly scuffling in the bag at the end of Cloud's angsty black goth bike for a pair of binoculars, banging them for a moment until they turned on night-vision, and whatever she saw made her cry out sharply in numb horror. Cloud took them from her, lifting them to his own eyes, just nodding once before passing them unspoken to Barret; I died of impatience, in the wake of the gunner's silence, before they were finally passed to me.

In the flames of the house were silhouetted dark things. In the flames of the house were silhouetted flying dark things, who leapt and danced in their silly jumping gait, before all of them were dwarfed by one freaking massive _huge_ round dark thing that lumbered squat in front of the conflagration before disappearing away so that I couldn't see it. They were innumerable. They were _airborne_. I put the binoculars down, in my lap, and gave a long whistle.

"Three words," I said. "What. The. And 'fuck' for extra emphasis."

"They eat part of the living," Cloud said, still dead and dull. "The heart. Whatever - and whoever - they eat becomes like them. I saw one eat a cat and do it. They'll devour the whole town, and then they'll have an army of five hundred, give or take. And then look for more."

"Spike." Even Barret sounded all hollow, like his insides had been scooped out by someone using both hands at once. And Barret could sound angry just if he yawned, so this was a new experience to relish. "You knew this an' you _never said shit_ - "

"I did." It was almost thoughtful, nearly dreamy, both of the blonde's hands shoved into his jacket pockets. "I told you both. I told you all the time."

The worst part of that, of course, was that it was true. And all Tifa could do was silently pile back into the pickup, with Cloud restarting his engine, and drive off into the night while Kalm burnt behind us. I watched it become a growing orange speck on the horizon, smaller and smaller as we left it, until the night was all dark again and we could see nothing.

* * *

I guess Tifa and Barret had to steel themselves to be used to it ages ago. Back in AVALANCHE days they used to squash people flat professionally when they were eco-terrorists, blowing up The Man. Tifa ground her teeth so loud I could hear it in the back of the truck, but she didn't turn it around and jet back to Kalm purely on the force of suicidal frenzy, so that was okay.

I think I was okay with it because I'm me, and it wasn't _my_ town. Cid always told me I looked out for number one so hard that I could scratch a living on a rock, which I always kind of looked at as a compliment, because hooray! I'm Queen of the Rock! Well, I mean, shit, I didn't bother to stew over it until later, and then I had the laundry list of best excuses anyone could ever have: if _I_ got turned into Shadow Me, heartless and yelloweyed, ready and armed with the Conformer, then things were _really fucked_ and if I was going to turn horribly evil couldn't I at least do it under my own steam.

At first I thought we were pretty much just running to _run_, to get the hell out of there (which was more than fine by me). Much to the disgust of everybody else, who were running on pure heartrushing panic, I feigned sleep most of the first leg of that journey: when I 'woke up' - okay, maybe I'd slept a _little_ - we'd gone offroad, stopping on a jolty mud path, deep in the hills and the forests. Pit stop. Barret had taken Marls off to go answer the call of nature, ostensibly, and Tifa was under a tree talking very softly into the PHS. Cloud just sat on his bike looking into the shadows like he wanted to cut up the night, very still, very sure, very mental patient. I yawned and rolled over. This holiday _sucked_.

"Are we there yet?"

"No," said Cloud.

"How long are we stopping?"

"Too long," said Cloud.

"Thanks, Captain Sunshine. Gaa-aaa-_wwwd_. Where are we going, anyway? Here's my vote. Let's go to the Gold Saucer! I want to cheat at the card tables _just once_ before I die. I am so pissed at you for giving Golderina away to Choco Billy for _absolutely nothing_, by the way, if we'd kept her racing we could all have been _gillionaires_ by now and I could have a _house_ made out of _materia_ - "

"We're going to Junon." He was so still you didn't believe he was talking if you looked at him: in the night his mouth was a dark gash and his eyes were worse, and his shoulders never moved. "We're going to die. We should head for the mountains until we can get airborne. If we can't, we'll stockpile. The higher and colder we go the less heat we'll give off."

"Whoa, thanks, but if you think I'm living in the hills with you for a year you're _dead wrong_."

"Year? I give us six months."

"Okay, correction, if you think I'm living up in the hills with you for _six months_ you're dead wrong."

"Have you ever wondered," he said, quite dreamy, "if all of this is real or not?"

"No, and talking to you hurts me in my brain-place," sez me. "If you think we're going to lose against the invasion of the Black Bees from Mars, you can go put your head in a bucket and have Barret hit it with a stick. I mean, hello, _Meteor_."

"_We_ didn't defeat Meteor." Cloud didn't turn around, but he said it more than sharply: enough for his head to tilt a little, golden spikes everywhere. He always looked like mobile lightning. "And Meteor was just a falling star. Meteor was dead rock. These have... voices."

"Yeah, well, _totally dead dead rock_ now and only _you_ hear the voices. If we'd been readier we could've taken Kalm. Just a little bit readier. I _told_ Tifa ten times we shouldn't have given Knights of the Round to that museum - "

"Nobody likes an 'I told you so'," the lady in question said wearily, shutting down the small antenna on her PHS, looking grim and cold like a mother bear. "Besides, we would have probably just levelled Kalm. Where's Barret and Marlene? We're going. We have to rendezvous with Reeve's people."

Oh, so that was who was on the phone. Made sense. Maybe she was getting financial advice. (We didn't see much of Reeve any more. This wasn't because he didn't dig us or anything, even though it's kind of creepy that Cait Sith was his animatronic alter-ego, and I got birthday presents that were admittedly pretty awesome. But being President takes up your time, apparently.) "Why can't we just get Cid to come and pick us up?"

"Because nobody can get through to Rocket Town."

"They'll have gotten to Rocket Town."

She didn't even look at him like she wanted to uppercut him, which was pretty restrained if you asked me. Actually, Tifa's dark eyes were beginning to hold a little of Cloud's; not in full entirety, a rock couldn't hold that much stone, but something of the dull horrified acceptance. It goes in stages. Denial. Acceptance. (And my special bonus stage, 'terrified adrenaline super-punch hyperactivity', but that has saved my ass for a while now.) "They've gotten to Junon. They've gotten everywhere. The little chiggers work fast. Reeve's working on it."

"There's nothing he can do."

This time, she _did_ give him the uppercut look. Then she did what she always did: clasped the flap of skin at the bridge of her nose, sucked in a breath, and counted to ten. When her dark head tilted back up, she looked less ragged and ready for violence. "Are you hungry?"

"No."

"Me! I am! Ask me!"

"Look in the blue zip-up pack, Miss Bottomless-Pit I-Didn't-Ask-You, there's last night's leftovers in the tubs - are you thirsty? Are you sure you're warm enough?"

"Yes."

She came over and fussed fruitlessly with his jacket, buttoning up another button as if to clasp him inside more firmly. Cloud bore this up with the patience born of his mind being ten million miles away out doing ecstatic headgripping dances with the stars, or something. Tifa fiddled with his gloves, and then she patted him on the cheek; he blinked at her very slowly, like a toad. "I just - I worry - "

"Don't."

It's times like that when you can't believe your first kiss was this guy.

"Where are Barret and Marlene?" she said briskly. Tifa had gone through it all before. Tifa damn well deserved a holiday with cabana boys on a sunny beach, with drinks with fake paper Wutaian parasols in them made on the cheap. "They should have been back by now. I told him not to go too far."

"Barret's a good dad, but it's pretty impossible to make a five-year-old piss on command," I said, regretfully setting down my cold greasy fried chicken on a plastic tublid and sucking on my fingers hard before I put my gloves back on. I hopped to my feet and the pickup creaked angrily as cartwheeled to the edge of the trailer, upside-down, walking myself along on my hands. (The forest looked just as creepy and horrible upside down. Everything looked a damn sight more creepy and horrible that night.) "Let me go get 'em, Tiff. I need to stretch my legs anyway."

I strolled amiably into the darkness, just to show the darkness what the hell was what, and broke into the tangly undergrowth where I had seen Barret and Marls disappear earlier. It wasn't exactly hard to track them, because Nature and Barret were never meant to be at odds and he flattened half the forest in an attempt to find Marlene the perfect bush, but it didn't mean that the entire thing wasn't making my skin jump slightly. We were all carrying our weapons, now. Conformer was holstered to my back, bright and gleamy with materia, and you can bet your sorry ass I kept on looking at it every five minutes just to make sure it was _still there_.

"Baaaaarret! Tifa's getting pissy! We gotta _go!_"

Silence. And then a small child's scream.

I ran towards the sound and the forest melted away from me, inconsequential, already pulling the windblades out of the loose straps as I barrelled - all heavy boots and jacket, no damn good - towards where I had heard the noise. There was another sound - _go east, you moron, left of the berry tree, go_ - and one round of Barret's gunarm, a broken-off curse, and I stopped dead and skidded on the snow in the heavy evergreen clearing.

"Aww, _man_, you guys nearly gave me a _heart attack!_" The scream had not been of pain or fear: it had been borne totally from annoyance, an indignant _eeek_, and Barret had obviously been as rattled as I was. Half a tree had been felled from gunshot fire. Marlene, red-faced, was rearranging her pants primly and glaring daggers at the intruder, who was resettling his tacky paper crown and looking equally peeved at what had probably almost been his untimely death.

"You think you got a heart attack? Yikes! We just got shot at!"

"Cram it, furball," the heavyset man growled, pulling Marlene's hood over her dark hair. "You _damn lucky_ I got these reflexes! Hell you doin' spyin' on my baby girl, anyhow!"

"I was NOT spying - "

"You're _rude,_" Marlene said furiously. "You're a _rude cat_ and a _rude Mog!_ I hope you get rocks thrown atta you an' you die - "

_not the things not the things not the things_

Cait Sith's mog did a stamping dance, apparently in distress, while the king cat himself jumped to his little feet and did a flailing dance of robotic feline impatience. "I got at least nineteen lives, kid! Where's the celebration? Where's the _fireworks?_ No 'oh, my! It's our saviour, Cait Sith!'? No 'how did he brave untold dangers just to see us, Cait Sith!'? No - "

_just the stupid cat not the things_

"Can we get a move on? Cloud's got Omnislash trigger fingers and if I squint, Cait, you _totally_ look like you wanna be one with the planet - "

"That ain't a way I'd like to go," the fuzzball said fervently. "_No_ sir. I'm a good cat. Brought up right. Never hacked up furballs. Never gave a _really bad_ fortune. Never told someone their wife was ugly to their face - "

"Hell's he **doin'** here, anyway - "

_and even so_

"Can we just get back to the truck? I don't _LIKE_ it here!"

Unfortunately, it was my outburst, and not, say, Marlene's. That stopped them all, and the area was so wide open for Cait to make snide remarks that I practically saw stars in his eyes so I added hastily: "My parents were killed by a forest when I was a baby. Wild forests. Yeah. Wild, roaming forests with killing on their minds, just like this one."

"You gettin' crazier every day," Barret said. "Yo' daddy sent us a letter last month."

"Naw, that old goon ain't my dad, I'm really a _fairy princess!_"

"Ha, ha! You aren't neither, kiddo, you got more puppy fat than a **kennel** - "

"Marls, if you wanna throw a rock at him, I totally give you _full permission_ - "

We got back to the camp. Eventually. While Tifa fussed over the smaller two of the returning three miscreants and fired questions at the robotic one of the pair like an interrogator on mako crack, I coolly strolled over to a tree and had a faint puke before coolly strolling back. The adrenaline was starting to get to me. I wanted it to be daylight. I wanted to wake up and have it all be a weird nightmare. See, I can find things novel, quickly, but then I don't find them novel any more even _quicker_.

I'm not saying I had some type of creepy radar to know what we were up against. I didn't. Oh, I _didn't_. I knew bull_shit_. But there's something in the survival mechanism of human beings that keeps 'em alive - the ones who aren't totally retarded. Don't touch that brightly-coloured snake. Don't shove your hand into that humming hive of death bees. Don't trust the man with the eyes that don't smile. And get the fuck _away_ from the little black shadow thing that only the crazy man saw, who ate a heart, and destroyed a town while you ran like a rabbit.

Of course, well, I'm _me_, top-heavy like a fox with the body of a _fairy ninja princess shut up_, and guys like Barret have all the danger sense numbers of room temperature. Maybe that's why -

" - yeah, in that beat-up truck, it's an hour's drive away," Cait was saying. "Hope you didn't pay too much for it, 'cause we're ditching this popsicle stand from _that_ point, hot stuff! No looking back! No looking to either side!"

"So where're we goddamn lookin', then?" asked Barret, who was looking disgruntled, because it sure as hell wasn't Cloud who Cait Sith thought was hot stuff. Or Marlene. Or himself. "We gotta head somewhere where we can start makin' a plan of attack, right, we ain't AVALANCHE for nothin'. I ain't _never_ gonna run my ass away from no more towns."

(Tifa, of course, lit up like a fistful of neon lights. The look he gave her was pretty sick.)

"Run?" The toy cat was hopping on one foot for aggrieved emphasis. "Run? Running is _over!_ Like heck we can run! We have to _hide_. We can't do ANYthing right now. We got these fleas in every major city and village on the whole Planet! We got police with _flame throwers_ out on the streets of Junon! You wanna see the pictures of Midgar? Black is the new black! There's _five_ of us! There's a million, jillion, billion of them!"

"There's eight of us," the long-haired brunette said, very quietly.

"_Five_," Cait insisted. "You heard us before. Rocket Town's down, we still have the reports coming in, so no go on Highwind. Ol' Red's still alive - well, he was half an hour ago - and his message pretty much was 'SOS!' so he could be wet red _animal chow_. And if they got him, they got the Huge Materia, so we're gonna catch it hot. Tall, Dark and Depressed isn't answering his PHS, either, so phooey on him - it's just us, ladies and gentlemen! Kiss the ones you love! Kick the ones you don't!"

No Cid. No Red. No Vincent.

"_Wait_," I said, desperate, before I knew what I was even saying, what my mouth knew and my brain really didn't but was running to catch up - "wait, wait, where's my dad? Where's Godo? What's happened to Wutai? Are they okay? They haven't got this stuff, right? No way could these things sneak up on a city full of _ninjas_."

"Hold your horses," the fortune-teller commanded. "Lord G said he was evacuating last we heard. I told you, _nobody's_ left out of this, even Ninjaopolis. He buzzed us, then the lights went out, just like everywhere else. No good trying to get there now. Heck, no _way_ to get there now - unless you got a pair of wings or something you ain't told us about?"

"But _Godo_ - "

"Let's go to the rendezvous point," Cloud interrupted shortly. "We haven't got the time for this. We've been sitting here too long."

And there was nothing to say to that. Even Tifa just sort of reached over to touch my shoulder, and Barret avoided my eyes, and Cait Sith did a half-caper on that big dumb robotic Mog. There was no response to Cloud being an asshole, because he was never so much a jackass as when he was probably right. (Nothing except swearing, or stomping your foot. I kind of indulged in the last one in the hopes it would make me feel better as we all depressedly shoved ourselves in the truck, muttering to each other, cold and cranky.

As expected, it didn't. It did make my socks wet, though.)

* * *

"Can I put on the radio?"

Reeve's rendezvous was an improvement on the truck. (Cloud had refused to part with his motorbike. However, there was boot space. There was a _lot of boot space_. There were also fire decals, which were totally mystifying, because it hadn't had fire decals the last time we had it, and why did Tifa give _everything of ours that was cool_ to either museums or Reeve? If I'd known that the car was going to be given to the **Turks**, I would've melted it down to be made into a hot statue of **me**.)

"If you put your greedy, filthy, greasy little ninja hands anywhere near me I'll break 'em at the wrist," Reno said tenderly. "Back _off_, sneakthief. I'm packin' battery, okay? Okay? Right, Rude, buddy?"

Silence. You could hear the dot dot dot.

"Rude thinks I am _cute_." My now-bare feet were placed squarely on the back seat where Cloud was, which meant my butt was there too, but it was Cloud so it didn't matter; Barret was there with Marlene asleep in his lap and Tifa's tired dark head buried halfway in his fireball tattoo and probably drooling all over him, and I couldn't see what Cait was doing which was never good. I was leaning into the front part of the buggy compartment: everybody's two favourite Turks apart from Tseng and Elena and Vincent (well, you know, in theory) and lighting up their lives in passive aggression that Rude got to ride shotgun and I didn't. Just to help Rude along, I pulled off his sunglasses and put them on my head, and began giving the shiny back of his skull erotic kisses which had him suddenly swearing so hard that the glasses fell off my head from vibration and into his lap. I was trying desperately not to think of my father. "Like _this_ and _this_ and _this_ - "

Reno actually guffawed loudly and mirthfully until Rude fixed his sunglasses on and gave him a Look, where he tried to turn it into a cough and take one hand off the wheel to smack in my general direction. I dodged nimbly, like a beautiful butterfly. "We sure as shit aren't paid enough to deal with annoying jailbait, Kisaragi, so get your butt in the back seat."

(Dot dot dot. Rude had a way with 'em.)

"'Course, if it was Tifa hanging over here, _rrowr_, I'd be payin' _Reeve_ - "

"You both are swayed by massive monstrous stripper boobs," I argued hotly, fully aware that if my own got any smaller there would be concave holes in my chest that would retain water when I hopped in the bath. "Besides, everyone knows that bigger than a handful is a _waste_."

"And _what_ a waste," said Rude, and Reno took one hand off the wheel to give him a high-five. **Men**. (Admittedly Tifa was not so much a waste by now as an environmental concern, but _jeez_. I was at this point egotistical enough to think that people should love me for my personality, in which case nobody should have loved me at all.)

"I hope you guys clean that crazy cattle prod after you play sexy man-games with each other. I hope I get an invite to the wedding. Do I? Can I be bridesmaid? Can I catch the bouquet? Can I put on the radio yet?"

They used their special agent training to ignore me, which was total abuse of the system. I drummed my fingers on the backs of the hard seats and squinted out the windshield to try to see what was ahead: they had the lights going at full blast, which probably wasn't a good idea now that I look back on it, but considering we were going faster than the buggy _ever_ had (except that one time involving Tifa and me in what had obviously been a hot rush of so much testosterone I'm surprised she didn't reach over and fondle my thigh or something as she slammed down the accelerator) I figure we didn't really have to worry. Well.

"Whoa, whoa, **fuck is that** - "

"Nine o'clock," Rude said.

We only got one flash of it before it hit. A little hopping blackfrog, eyes catching white from the strength of our lights, antenna twitching just a little and knitting its hands together as it stared blankly at the buggy. At first I thought that Reno was swerving wildly to avoid it, but then I realized he was swerving so he could _hit_ it, and you better believe it flew like a piercedairball into the underbrush. The noise that he gave after that was part triumph and part disgust and the buggy engine purred with him; I would have admired it more on the spot if my heart hadn't been in my mouth just from seeing another one of the damn things again, confirmation of the nightmare. The only noise in that car for a little while was all of our breathing, and the buggy cantering off merrily into the sunset.

"Shit, I'm gettin' to hate those things. That's going to take a while to get out of the treads."

"Gross," I said eventually. "Cool, but _yeech_. You did it wrong, though."

"Eh?"

"_You should have gone back and reversed over it._"

"This car ain't stopping for the fucking Cetra Messiah, Kisaragi, but point taken."

"I thought we weren't taking a route with fleas." Rude again. (With his voice carrying a slight inflexion, so you knew he meant something if he was trying to _emote_.)

"We _aren't_."

The other Turk thought about it for a while. "Fuck."

"_Fleas?_ Who thought up _that_ one?" I stuck my head forward a bit so that I could see their faces better, twisting a little in a way that meant a car accident would leave me seriously deformed, but hey. "Do we get a dinner coupon if we think up a better name? I bet they have a creepy alien name with like no vowels - "

"Heartless," said a graveyard voice from the shadows of the back seat. (Guess who.)

"That has _vowels_, that's not exciting. That's cheesy."

"It's not a suggestion," Cloud said. "That's who they are. The Heartless. They don't have hearts. They want more."

"Where'd you hear that one, Strife?" Reno.

"The darkness told me," Cloud said.

Silence in the car again. The other two were so totally nonplussed that there were no plusses in the car forever after. They gave each other a heterosexual lifemate series of communicative eyebrow wriggles and shoulder movements, which I couldn't quite translate, and probably didn't want to anyway. "We could push him out now that Tifa's asleep," I suggested, _sotto voce_. "He does this stuff _all the time._"

"Heard dat," said another voice from the backseat. "Shut yo' mouth, girl, nobody deserve bein' pushed out to them Heartless things. _Nobody._"

"Aww, _Barret_ - "

"'Sides, anyone pushes Strife out, it'll gonna be _me._"

"Thanks," said the man in question, and I couldn't actually tell whether it was sarcasm or not. You never can. And after that, Barret was quiet or asleep, I couldn't tell and I really didn't want to poke. So I turned back to the two stooges.

"Can I be a Turk now that I've shown my loyalty to the Company?"

"_No_," they chorused, flat and slightly horrified, which I took total offense to and never forgot and they'll be totally sorry, because wouldn't I look _awesome_ in that outfit? I could wear a natty little business suit and have a gun. Maybe my business suit would be an arresting kind of grey or something. I would be ten million times hotter than even Elena. I would have sunglasses with rectangular frames, really _cool_, really forbidding, and I'd change my name to something short and terrifying. Like Blade Kisaragi. How cool is that? _Blade Kisaragi_. However, I swear that I had never thought elaborately about this at length ever or even daydreamed momentarily about leaving the noble career of ninja for totally notfun Turkhood, so don't get the wrong idea. Yeah.

"Gawd, _fine,_ who wants to be a dumb old Turk anyway? It'd ruin my image. Besides, Reno looks like a businessman who wandered into a _bondage lounge_."

"Hey, funny you said that, actually - "

Another screaming swerve. This time there was another bump, and another, until the others had woken up in the backseat and Marlene made a sort of angry kitten mew of fear and discontent, and the dirt road was one long track of black tar splatters. Reno gripped the wheel so tightly that his knuckles were pale, and I saw that he had freckles on the backs of his hands, which I saved for future reference. There was absolute dead dull silence except for the _bump, bump, bump_, and then stone cold nothing when we stopped. And that time, it was _him_ who went: dot dot dot, the three-beat silence samba, the last breath before the plunge.

"Let's fucking jet," said Rude, and I wholeheartedly agreed.


	3. iii: the night is not beautiful

**But That Was In Another Country**

* * *

**iii. **_the night is not beautiful_

* * *

The worst part about the first assault of the Heartless is that not much looks different. In parts of the city, there's fire, but that's only because they want to flush you out for the Shadows as the Big Bodies crack the concrete and hulk past the harbour. There was no aerial assault for Junon, because - but I know that now, and I didn't know that then, and all I knew in the buggy was that the city didn't _look so bad_. A little bit smoky, a little bit crappy, but Junon always looked like that _anyway_. It was just quiet. Only now I know that the worst sign is silence, but -

You know this stuff, you know all this stuff. Here I go.

Okay, then we got a little bit closer and it was like a kind of like an awesome city marathon where the main prize was that you didn't get to get your heart sucked out for an extra five minutes. Of course, you didn't _have_ to get your heart sucked out. Some people were just lying there all fried by the little Heartless in witch hats, ice and lightning and fire, and Reno our capable defensive driver hit a couple dozen corpses and half a ton of debris as we ran through the outskirts of the city. He sure as shit did not want to get _near_ that city. He veered off merrily towards the foothills, Rude all ready with his gun and the window rolled down. We were all awake now, even Marlene, sitting in the back very quietly with dead eyes: she was a good girl.

"Doesn't this hunk of _fucking junk_ fucking _go fucking_ faster _fucking fuck fuck fuckettes cheering in a fuck band,_" Reno said, slightly incoherently but with ten points for usage. We were going so fast already that the ground churned underneath us and trees blurred mesmerizingly in the background. "I fucking _hate_ this _fucking car_."

Tifa scrubbed at her temples with her hair all over. She looked like she had a body headache. "Reno, if you don't mind for the _under-sixes_ - "

"The _under-sixes_ can go _work in a fuckin' pedo fuckin' brothel_ for all I _give a damn_, Lockhart, they can have a _fuck parade_ with _fuck bunting_, the suspension in this thing is _shit_ - "

" - Marlene, don't you _listen to jest one word_ that man is sayin'! Goddamn it, Turk! Shut yo' mouth! - "

" - Marlene, sweetheart, you know that there are _some words_ adults say when they're stressed and this is just one of those situations - "

"I bet you don't kiss your momma with that mouth, Mister," Marlene announced, before Barret could shoot through to the front seat and save her innocence but kill us all in the process. This broke the ice by making Reno laugh so hard that he almost drove us into a patch of scrubland, and then he went back to cursing the car's sexual history, present and probable future.

Barret would beat the back of his seat occasionally, which caused the car to fishtail out of control every so often as Reno's spine got rearranged. Rude would every so often give Reno Looks that were translateable as wifely backseat driving, because then Reno would swear at him instead of the car, and do what felt like fishtailing the buggy deliberately just to show who was on top. It was so painfully early in the morning that the night hadn't been evicted yet; and the only one who looked comfortable was Cloud, who obviously was mentally calculating how long it would take for his Heartless to chew our bodies in the mangled wreckage of the vehicle when it finally crashed. Tifa looked tired. Reno looked drawn. And then there was me, really wanting a juice pack and to hit something, and preferably a pee break while we were all at it.

Fun times, fun times.

Cait Sith eventually spluttered to life again with a burst of radio static as our driver molested small bushes: the noise made Marlene give a little scream, which made Reno fishtail again, which made Rude's head bang on the top of the window frame. This made Barret slam his fist into the back of Rude's seat, which caused Tifa to give Barret what was a very skilled Wutaianese burn on his forearm. Anarchy broke out.

"Barret, just _stop it_, you're not helping!"

"_ - I'm gonna tear your head off and shit down your neck if you keep on goddamn doing that, Wallace - _"

"Reno has a problem and this problem is _road rage_ - "

"_ - your neck too, Kisaragi - _"

"Damn it," Reeve's voice crackled through on Cait's radio. "If you don't all shut up right now, I'm going to turn that car around **right back to Midgar, so help me God.**"

We all shut up. There was a faintly impressed silence on the other end of the PHS imbedded in the cat-doll, as if he hadn't actually expected that coming. The President cleared his throat a little, embarrassed, and it was Rude who eventually spoke.

"How you doin', Mr. President?"

"Like shit," crackled Cait's box, tired and rather dejected. That wasn't like Reeve at _all_. He was usually kind of creepily happy-clappy middle-age-crisis. "Administration count of fifty-six in the shelter, we couldn't save anyone else. Elena will start sealing things behind you as you make your way into the tunnel."

How'd our baby girl do?" Reno.

Another cough. "Other than blowing up half the street with grenades and completely wrecking my office? _Where_ did she get that chaingun?"

"Birthday," said Rude, as if that explained everything, while Reno gave little motherly clucking noises as if his small child had taken its first toddling steps. This was _incredibly frightening_. My future assassin group with a better name was going to be sure as hell not be a kind of horrible STD to member sanity.

"I was happier not knowing. Look, can you go any faster?"

"No," Rude said, at the same time as the inevitable "_Not unless somebody gets out to **fucking push!**_"

"Where are we being taken to?" asked Cloud.

Short, faintly crackly silence. "Let's just say Shinra government was very paranoid, which works in our favour. Reno, remember that you don't go past the fifth barrier. Look, we'll talk when you're safe - "

"There is no 'safe'," said Cloud.

I didn't really blame Reno for making the kind of irritated sound halfway through clearing his throat and honking his nose. "Look, Strife, it's this or goddamned fuckin' dead - "

"Yeah," said Cloud. "There is 'dead'."

After that we drove in really peppy, positive silence as Reno rounded a hill that turned out not to actually be a hill: as the bald Turk calmly pushed a button that sure as hell hadn't been in the buggy before, part of the hill _opened up_ like a garage door, a huge enormous steel door in the hillside - and we went into a lit-up corridor and it closed behind us with an enormous thud, the lights went out as we went. One enormous barrier, and it closed behind us. Thus. Two. Thud. Three. Thud. Four. Thud. And at the fifth one, as we went along that hastily-sealed gravel road - there was Reeve, waiting by the fifth door, with Elena next to him in a rumpled black-bloodied suit with that enormous chaingun in her hands. Her blonde hair was covered in blood. (At this point she was pretty much the coolest person in the world apart from me.) Reno hit the brakes so hard he almost killed us by ploughing into the next steel door and he and Rude kicked the doors open, skipping over to the blonde hand-in-hand accompanied by violin music and floating petals. (Actually they just walked.)

"God, you're _so hot like fire_ with that, sweetcheeks," Reno said.

"I'm not going out to dinner with you."

"I'm sorry I said you had a laugh like a horse, Ellie-Lennie-Lena."

"_Reno. Don't call me tha -_ hey, I forgot you said that! Now I'm _really not going out to dinner with you._"

"That's okay, I don't have money anyway and you eat like you're fat. Actually, you _are_ getting a little chubby around the ass area - "

"Hey," I hollered out the window, sliding out while Tifa stretched and unbuckled Marlene and got bags and Cloud slid over Barret's lap to go unlock the boot and there was general buggy-exiting mayhem, "_hey_, it's not like _I_ wouldn't be totally mad hotter if I had it - "

"No, you wouldn't," said Rude.

"Kisaragi, don't make me _laugh_. Like this: Ha! Ha! Ha! You're ugly."

"Sorry, Wutaian," Elena said, not at all apologetically _whatsoever_, and began stroking her chaingun in a way that pretty much confirmed _every Turk was deranged_, and I was going to kill Reno for the rest of his life for the former remark. "Baby and I are attached to each other. Baby's my good girl, aren't you, Baby? _Yes,_ you are - "

"It's stopped being hot now," Reno pointed out, but Elena hit him in the elbow with Baby and he spent the time curled up in Rude's manly arms crying in agony while his bald king of romance caressed his thick crimson hair and whispered sensually to him (actually he just rubbed his arm and said 'fuck' while Rude adjusted his sunglasses).

"Enough horseplay," said His Royal Highness President Combover, who'd been elbow-deep in his other robot self which is kind of like masturbation or incest. Reeve _always_ carried a screwdriver. "You three get what you need, we're continuing with the plan. Strife, Lockhart - we'll be going into the passage, all right? I'll explain once we're less in imminent danger - "

"How come them Turks ain't comin' with us, man?" Barret. He looked less in tender caring for the Turks' health than irritated that they might get to beat and shoot something before he did: this was complicated by the fact that Rude had just punched open a keylock on a nearby cabinet welded into the rock face of the wall, and all three were excitedly packing themselves with ammo, battery packs, guns, and what looked like a flamethrower. "Fuck if I'm lettin' a _Turk_ go 'fore I can get my hands on summa them Heartful bugs or whatever - "

"Barret's got a point," Tifa said, and Barret gave her a take-off-your-clothes look of mindless adoration (I wish I could put something alternate here, but he did). "I _think_ we're experienced enough to join in the fight here, Reeve."

"No, we're not."

" - It's not even been a year so it's not like I've forgotten how to throw a punch - look, Cloud, I'm sorry and I understand, but please would you quit it?" (_Understand?_ Looking back I don't know who she was kidding, unless she had a special Crazy Bitch to Actual Sense dictionary somewhere on her person.)

"If you go out there you're going to die," said Cloud. "If you go out there you will get killed. That's the long of it and that's the short of it. The darkness doesn't care, the darkness doesn't pick and choose... It's not about how much you've done or how much you've fought or who you are. The Heartless will kill you. The Heartless will kill all of us. The Heartless will kill the Turks, and then they'll find their way down here sooner or later, and then we're all going to die."

There was a short silence: even Rude had stopped caressing the thing that looked like a flamethrower. Everyone stared at him. Marlene squirmed a little in her father's arms. Tifa's cheeks were turning flaming red as she practically held her breath and tried to keep it all inside her: and finally, with superhuman effort, all that burst out was "_This is why nobody ever picked you for kickball._"

Another little helpless silence occurred as she stormed over to lean against the buggy door. Reeve cleared his throat a number of times as I got distracted by looking at Reno with deep and abiding lust (not because it was Reno, but because he was strapping a bandolier of grenades to his chest and I was wondering if he'd swap for a Throw materia or something). "Look, if I could fit you all in the Shinra helicopter, I would, but right now the Turks are ready and you're _not_. You need to regroup. They're going to basically be doing recon, don't worry." ("Recon with a flamethrower, yo, motherfucker," said Reno.) "Cloud - uh - is partially right: going out there with no game plan is going to mean imminent death. We just need to secure ourselves and _then_ go from there. If you'd follow me - no, we'll leave the buggy up here. Rude, oh-six-hundred hours, okay? There's a unit in the helicopter. Seal it behind you. Um, I don't have anything inspiring to say here, so just... Don't die, all right?"

"Take care, Boss," Reno said.

"Look after yourself, Mr. President!"

"Dot dot dot," said Rude. (Only not literally.)

There was a sort of awkward, quiet _knowing_ as they finally suited themselves up, and checked each other's guns, and packed it to their backs like donkeys and started the slow shimmy up a ladder on the side of the wall that was basically iron staples shoved in the rock. I watched their ascent: and suddenly, Tifa cried out, "Stay safe, you guys, okay?"

"Hey, well, you too, AVALANCHE." Princess Big Gun.

"If I don't, will your tender fingers unbutton my shirt?" King Retard.

"... You too, Tifa." The Duke of Baldness.

"Oooo-_ooooo_, you called her _Tiiii-faaaa_ - "

"... shut _up_."

"Kill a couple for me," I suddenly hollered at them, suddenly and magnanimously fond of them all, Elena and Rude and Reno and their stupid business suits and their stupid group name and the total sex that Reno and Rude would be having later that night as they both seethed in passionate man-jealousy over Rude's attentions to Tifa and Elena, I dunno, held the camera. "Kill a _lot_ for me. I'm totally worth it. Kill like ten million."

"Hey, you dance like you've got ass in your pants, Kisaragi," said Reno -

- and then they were all gone, up into a sliding trapdoor that closed with a final dull clang as we saw the last of the soles of Rude's fashionable shoes, and Reeve was staring after them with a kind of wild and fathomless _lost_ in his eyes: like the Papa Bear who'd lost Goldilocks or something and was never ever about to see the three bowls of organic gluten-free porridge again. Me, I didn't know why anybody would bother worrying about the Turks considering that if buildings fell on them it'd generally just hurt the building and it would cry and maybe sue for damages. They were like cockroaches...

(and we all were)

... and then Robo-prez just pulled a horrible handkerchief out his pocket and mopped his forehead with it, and that was that.

"Let's not waste any more time," he said. "This is the last leg of our journey."

* * *

Home, sweet home.

President Shinra may have also been the President of Paranoia, but apparently the idea of hanging out in a bunker in Junon had never inspired him with the instinct to make it non-ugly. Maybe the one in Midgar had flowery wallpaper and nice chairs or something, I don't know. _This_ place was a warren of concrete rooms and the types of horrible beige plastic chairs you get in schools (I just saw them as horrible plastic beige things, anyway, I went to _ninja school_ and you get throwing darts and sneakiness to sit on). There was lots of dingy metallic furniture and computer systems and radios and bare floor. Cloud immediately went around knocking on the walls, saying hello to the insulation goblins or looking for treasure. Anyway, it also had rooms full of _really awful retarded bunks_ - you know, rough brown military blankets, that kind of stuff - and it was more than a little depressing how small a space we filled up. There was, like, a bunk room for every two of us. It was _big_. Big and ugly and cold with dingy lights. It was underground. There was nowhere to run.

"This place makes me want to commit _ritual suicide_," I said.

"Please don't," said El Presidente Tuesti. "I'm sure nobody here wants to make the third incision for you."

"You're funnier as a robot."

I would have elaborated on his general more-attractiveness and charm as a mechanical cat, but there was a sort of human tide that crept out of the rooms at his voice - a dispirited, grey-skinned, dead-eyed and frantic tide, filled with old sweat and old terror, who started up a chorus that stopped us AVALANCHE-ites cold. The refrain went a little bit like this:

"The communications, Mr. President - "

"My father - "

"My brother - "

"My children - "

"My husband - "

"Please," said Reeve, over the hubbub, and when it didn't work quite so well, "Please - "

Thankfully, we had the Human Megaphone, and Barret - Marlene perched on one brawny shoulder - surged up in front of the wave like a big killer wave, waving his arm in a distinctly menacing way. "Hey! **Fools!** _We cain't hear ourselves thinkin'!_ Shut yo' HELL up!"

They shut their hell up.

"Believe me when I say I am doing all I can," said Catman, with a lot more grace and smoothness than I gave him credit for. I bet he was slipping opium or something on the sidelines. Maybe he should have just worn a t-shirt saying ALL OF YOUR LOVED ONES ARE DEAD, once Cloud had made them up. "As are AVALANCHE. I can't disclose information right now for city security, but we _are_ doing all we can with what staff we have. Please. Anna, would you start rigging up everybody's cellphones to the PHS and computer system, just in case we get messages? Thank you. If you'll excuse me for a few minutes..."

It wasn't really an escape of mutual consent, but considering Barret was still waving his arm threateningly at the posse of vagrants in their business casual and their burnt-off eyebrows, they let us pass. I grabbed Cloud's sleeve in his sad and endless fight to communicate with his lost love, the wall; Reeve lead us down a corridor into a makeshift meeting-room and locked a door behind us. It was thick as a plank. The door, I mean; the room just was small and sucked. Tifa pulled out a chair for Cloud which he absently sat down in and she straightened out his collar and fixed his hair, and touched the tips of his ears, and that she could still feel such tenderness towards him and not snap his horrible little neck was testament to Tifa. Maybe Saint Tifa the Masochistic, I don't know.

"First things first, Prez," I said, and hopped into one of the beige horribles in a cute backwards slide. "My dad. Wutai. _Now._"

"Uh," - which was the most awkward tardpause in the world. "Well. First things first... Wutai has a complete blackout at the moment, Yuffie, completely dark. We've lost communications, but considering the Da Chao caves, Godo and your people are probably better off than many others... There's the same blackout in Cosmo Canyon, but we have... film. The only recent report we've gotten from anywhere was from the barracks holed up at Condor, who are probably more than used to this type of thing. There are fleas currently in Costa del Sol, we've gotten no word from Nibelheim, they were evacuating Rocket Town, Icicle Town, Gongaga - there's no hope of getting into Midgar, apparently all you can hear are the screams from the slums."

"_Goddamn_," said Barret, and Tifa rubbed her temples. "God-_dayum_. What 'bout Highwind? What's he doin'? Weren't he doin' some kinda shit for you anyway - "

"The rocket, yes," Reeve admitted. "I've had nothing from him or the engineers, either. I was actually meant to go by to see how they were fine-tuning the engines, salvaging the space project... I guess it's all useless now, considering the fleas."

"Heartless," said Cloud, and Barret laid one hefty hand on his arm.

"Strife," he growled, "you're gonna tell us _every_ damn thing yo' messed-up head can think about, understand? You gotta _git farther_ or I'm gonna pound you, goddamnit!"

"Give up the crazy goss, Cloud," I said.

"Please," added Saint Tifa the Masochistic.

"Papa says you are as dumb as a box of hair," offered Marlene, as a kind of afterthought.

Cloud didn't sit. He leant against the wall, stiff and cold; he moved his hand across and rapped the wall again, and listened to the sound, and tilted his head back against the cold stone and closed his eyes in some kind of ecstasy. "They are making their way to open the keyhole," he said, dreamy. "They are making their way... the Darkness has been moving for a while now. The key is... Huh. Makes sense, doesn't it?"

"_No._"

"The Heartless are one," he said. "I and the Heartless and he are one."

"Straight bullshit. We ain't got time to listen to Strife spazzin', Teef - "

"Everything returns to shadows," said Cloud.

"He's the only one apart from Vincent who's got Mako in him, and the Jenova cells. He can probably hear things we can't, Barret. You _know_ he can hear things we can't. You know they messed with his brain!"

This prompted a Domestic. Their voices both went low and mean - well, Barret's version of low and mean, which could still be heard for miles - and they hissed at each other in curt sentences which we could only catch snatches of if we eavesdropped appropriately and I know _I_ did:

"Yeah, an' ninety-nine percent of it's jes' on account of him bein' a stupid piece o' - "

" - _Barret_, don't you - "

" - crazy-makin' shithole - "

" - that doesn't mean we can't - "

" - egg-headed moron-foo' - "

"Every heart contains it," said Cloud.

" - just _stop_ it - "

" - stankin', bug-eyed, weepin' - "

" - _Barret - _"

Reeve, Marlene and I exchanged a Look; I pulled Marlene down from Barret's shoulder when she held her small arms out to me ("Need a bathroom," she said. "You're sure as hell not the only one, kiddoo," sez me) and I pulled her to my hip: she was heavy as hell, so I promptly passed her to Reeve, who suddenly had a piggyback filled with five-year-old and looked perturbed at this. Barret and Tifa didn't notice and continued bitching at each other in furious domestic-fight voices, with clenched fists. Cloud went back to stroking the walls.

It was at this point I pretty much believed we were done for.

* * *

The first two days or so were kind of like living in a crazy ghost town where all the zombies were manic depressives. Nobody talked much. They put Tifa in the kitchen and she did amazing things with canned food (she could make corned beef satisfied that it had died for a purpose), but she wasn't talking to Barret at all, and so they went through a pantomime of clenched teeth and Marlene-tell-Tifa or Marlene-tell-your-father which was hilarious for about sixty seconds. We didn't find Cloud at all for hours, which was kind of relaxing, only eventually he turned out to be wedged in this concrete crevice listening to his girlfriend, the wall, and we left him there and Tifa gave him meals so that he wouldn't die and smell up the place. Marls found this horrible old box of board games, so we played Wutaianese Checkers and Shinraopoly (which I always won, and ended up putting awesome-ass hotels on the Shinra Building and the Presidential Park and knifing her for debt).

One of the accountants hung himself on the third day. We actually had to put him in an abandoned freezer room because we couldn't bury him, which was _mad gross_.

On the fifth day, when I had just invented the backwards triple-flip death-defying somersault in the horrible big echoing gym with the bicycles that didn't work, Reeve came to me. (His natty little beard already looked horrible and he was getting radical sideburn growth.)

"Yuffie," he said. "I have a problem."

The problem was actually not that he was madly in love with me and wanted to repopulate the world startin' _now_, which was a good thing, because imagine ninja babies with sideburns. It just does not work. The problem was this: he had fifty crazy staff all crammed into the communications room with their cellphones, waiting for somebody to ring who never would, and he wanted me to sit in there and lock the door and wait for somebody to ring who never would instead as some form of crowd control. Apparently it was a matter of securty blah blah blah blibbety blah, but really I was the only AVALANCHE sap who was bored enough to say yes and Marlene couldn't reach the phones unless she sat on an encyclopedia.

I waited for all of them. I waited for my dad. I waited for somebody's son or nephew or grandparent to phone, or for any poor sap out there in the whole entire world who had Reeve's phonenumber or something, for any sign of _yes_ down there in that horrible oppressive little cavern survival shelter. I gave up about an hour after I took the job, read from a selection of the library (bad romance novels: I chose I'm Having Your Baby... But You're A Turk!), hung upside down from my knees from a ceiling railing, ate a truckload of leftover corned beef sandwiches and flicked over to the good parts in But You're A Turk!, giving various parts to Reno, Rude and Elena (currently Reno was the knocked-up secretary and Elena the rapist ex-boyfriend, leaving Rude the bare-chested hero). Generally I tried to do this all at the same time for variety. One day on the ninth day I opened to one of the later chapters and noted the word 'nipple' ('Wantonly Shirilla arched up to meet Biff's mouth and caress his thigh, capturedas it was in the greybusiness casual that made every cell of her ache for him, and he found her nipple through her dress. Her violet eyes flashed with abandon. "I'm so pregnant for you," she moaned.') and suddenly got such a shock that I toppled from the ceiling railing and fell to the office chair with an injurious clatter. There was a reason for this: Cloud's PHS had clicked, and given that low grinding _brring brring_ of warning.

"Cloud Strife? Come in." Click. "Tifa Lockhart? Come in." Click. "Barret Wallace? Come in. Come in." Click. Click. "Yuffie Kisaragi? Come in. - "

By the time he'd gotten to Cait, I'd managed to scrabble to my own PHS, mashing down on the buttons, shrieking in absolute glee through the really-badly-soundproofed walls, echoing off the stone and hollering until I was hoarse and bellowing into the handset and out the door and everywhere. There was only one man in the entire world who could sound terse and morose at the same time.

"Hey! _Hey!_ Guys! IT'S **VINCENT!**"


	4. iv: swallowing sundown

**A/N:** I am so sorry this took so long. I am a horrible person going to fanfiction hell.

**

* * *

**

******But That Was In Another Country**

* * *

**iv.** - _swallowing sundown_

* * *

So I guess we'll skip that bit.

- Ha! You sucker. That's like thumbing over Biff and Shirilla's bad sex scenes. As if.

* * *

"So you're in your _coffin_ in your _dumb mansion_ and you obviously haven't gone to the toilet for _days_ - Barret, look, stop it, Vincent and me are having a conversation, _gawd_ - I bet you are more bored than anyone else in the entire universe. I also bet you smell like Grandpa's couch. Man, I guess I better entertain you from here on in. Okay, how's this; I'll read to you from an improving moral tale of high literary value I found, about One Woman and her Motherhood and Love for a Turk. I bet you are excited now because you were a Turk." ("Yuffie, give us the phone, I mean it," said Tifa.) "Geez, is it loud in here or what. Anyway, keep trying not to pee, I'll skip us over to the good bits. 'Shirilla removed her gossamer nightrobe, and in the darkness Biff could see the slightest hint of lace panties - '"

It was at this moment in time that Barret removed me from the chair and held me upside down, shaking diligently, while Tifa sat in _my_ seat and picked up the PHS. She shook her ponytail out of the way and thoughtfully stuck one finger in the opposite ear. "Vincent? _Vincent!_ - "

The long and short of it is this: is that when they came to Nibelheim, he stood at the window and saw them - saw the wizards moving among the buildings, hunting for the stragglers who sometimes stayed in the rotting eaves of the empty town, the dogs, the birds, the cats - saw the Red Nocturnes and Yellow Operas knocking like bells and darting over rooftops, he lay on the roof and reloaded Death Penalty over and over and sniped what he could. When he realized what they were they were already coming for him up the street - so he went inside, and went down the steps, back to his crypt and his coffin and to slow his heart so that he was dead to them. And he lay there without moving, hardly breathing, hardly alive in the way only he knew how.

Lame.

(I mean, for one thing, he should have hid in the safe where we found the Odin materia and the Lost Number, because let's face it, with the size of Lost Number I bet there's a hidden kitchenette and bathroom unit and spa pool back there.)

" - but you didn't get through to Cid?" Tifa looked totally crestfallen; she was chewing on the end of a pen, a nervous habit that probably enthralled many, turning around and giving the assembled throng megaglares as she listened. "What? Oh, I see - I - I don't understand, I just don't. That's something, I suppose. We'll get Yuffie to try her again. Don't move one inch, okay? _Not one inch._ We'll come to get you."

"No, we won't," said Reeve. (He had been learning cues from Cloud.)

"What? No, Vincent, we're not leaving you there - no, I - we're not going to leave you behind - They're _what?_"

The phone was very gently taken from her by Barret, out of the way of her grasp as he turned around and handed Marlene to me by way of some kind of threeway trade. To this Tifa stared at him with huge, betrayed eyes, furious and white-fisted, but he turned away from her and held the handset to his ear.

"It's Barret on now, bro; damn, but you're gonna have yerself a real shitstorm up there, I hell of don't know what - no, we ain't in no position from here - " ("I fucking hate you, Barret Wallace," said Tifa, which made Marlene bury her face in my chest and make my t-shirt damp with little girl. She smelled like wet puppy.) " - get the shit outta there, jackass, I'll be goddamned if we're all sittin' like motherfuckin' rats! I don't care! - I'm not dyin' underground here; I been a coal man all my life, and lemme tell it straight, man was meant to be underground he'd have a goddamn drill on his goddamn dick! This is one train we're gettin' _off_ of, you hear me!"

It was at this point that Marlene began to cry, very innocently and wholly, like the four-year-old she was; me being the only one with any sense and Reeve making panic-stricken eyebrow motions in his horrible sweatstained pinstripe shirt, I hustled her out of there before she could reach full-bore wail and alert her father. She had a tantrum in the kitchen, so I picked the lockbox and gave her some sugar candy from it. She cried as she sucked, cheeks bright red and me wiping her nose lest she choke of mucus cloggage (I am never breeding) and sitting her on my lap, which she refused to leave.

"That was boring," I said presently to her. "I thought it was going to be somebody cool on the phone, like a magical moon man."

She hiccupped scornfully and sucked on the candy. She sounded like an industrial cleaner.

"Look, kid, don't mind them, also don't choke."

"I wanna go home," she said, and her big brown eyes welled up with tears. She also welled up with mucus, and this time I was totally not prepared to touch that without a towel and a stick. "I wanna go home."

"Leenie, you know we - "

"I want. To. _Go. HOME!_"

Marls put the candy between her teeth and pummelled me, being her father's daughter; took her little fists and punched me as hard as she could in my ribcage, as I leant against the steel cabinet and held her, hit me and hit me and hit me. (She actually had a pretty mean right hook.) Eventually, exhausted of Kisaragi abuse, she put her head on my shoulder and sucked on the candy and simply cried.

"I can't have a pony here," she said eventually.

"Nope. No room."

"I was gonna get a pony when I turned seven. That's only three years."

"They were probably lying. I was going to get a pony when I turned eight. Do you see any pony now?"

"If I was - was good all the time - d'ya think they'd stop fightin'?"

"I don't think if _I_ was good all the time they'd stop fighting," sez me, but at Marlene's full bottom lip starting to tremble furiously - "Look, this has nothing to do with you, okay? At all. Zip. Zap. Nothing you do is making them sad. They just want to go home, too, with crazy Uncle Cloud and everyone. Just like the last time." Man, there had been a _last time_. "Only instead of being with nice Mrs. Aerith's Mom, you're here, okay? Also, you haven't been kidnapped by Turks, so that's total icecream on the cake, because kidnap by Turks means you grow up stunted. Possibly also a fag hag. - Everyone's just grouchy at the moment, so we'll leave them alone to be grouchy. Tell you what, let's arrange those alphabet magnets on the bulletin board to spell rude words. It's educational."

By the time Marlene had learnt how to spell 'urethra', the long and lame conversation was over. Reeve and Barret and Tifa looked gloomier than ever; Cloud, who hadn't been present, was obviously checking out his girlfriend, the wall. Reeve disappeared to the Reevecave or wherever he went in times of distress; I hadn't been able to find out despite long ninja searches. (Possibly out of boredom. Who wanted to find the Reevecave?) Tifa picked up the little girl and hugged her tight to her ample chest, nearly suffocating her, and thankfully not noticing the word 'flange' on the b-board.

"Do you mind going back to man the comm room, Yuffie? I wouldn't ask, only Vincent said he got through to Shera, only she put the phone down after mumbling a lot, I don't really understand." She looked tired; she looked tireder than ever, these days, sort of grim and worn down to a nub. We'd already gone through about three punching-bags in the gym due to Tifa Lockhart's Insane Crazed Rocket Punches, and I think she had been trying the steel walls in lieu, because her knuckles were bandaged. "I know it must be one awful bore - "

"Don't worry about me, Shirilla is going to be having her mystery baby the next chapter."

"I'll make you something special for dinner," she nearly begged at my acquiesce. "I found some canned ham. I know you like ham. I'll hash it with - with - potatoes - "

For some reason, the terrible fate of canned ham and mash made her burst into tears, and that got _me_ going, which is all you can get from canned ham and potatoes. She took the Marlene-free arm and put her arm around me and we cried like total sissies, hugging each other as hard as we could, me with my arms around her waist and Marlene and pressing myself into her. She smelled like soap and sweat and powder, of Tifa, my terrible and secret excuse for a mother-cum-sister, of shampoo and of heavy-duty bra cups.

"Don't cry," Marlene begged us. "I can spell _urethra_."

After this we broke down hooting, Tifa's cheek next to my cheek as she bent a little, wet and hot with tears. "I feel so useless," she whispered to me.

"Don't," I said, Comfort Of The Year. "Don't."

She straightened up and wiped her face with the back of her hand. I had already surreptitiously wiped my face on the back of Marlene, because, you know, she was right there and everything. "Ham for supper," she said determinedly, in the same way she might say _bandage for your wound_, or _ass-kicking for mako beasts_.

"Fried ham and grits," said Marlene.

"Baked ham and _vegetables_." (Boy, **someone** had Mom Syndrome. I bet everything gave Cloud gas or sadness or something.)

"Broiled ham and ham-beasts," I said. "I, on the other hand, will be in the comm room with Biff and Shirilla. I _may be some time._"

"I can't believe you can _read_ that thing," said Tifa, and I loved her, and she left.

* * *

I put my legs up and did what they asked me to: I called Shera. Nothing. I called Junon Pizza for luck - "This branch of Junon Pizza cannot take your order right now, if we're not here in ten minutes your order is free!" - and then Shera again. Nothing. Nothing except that Junon Pizza owed me another free pizza, and they owed me about seventy thousand nine hundred and fifty three, which may alert to you that I would not be getting any pizza any time soon.

And then I called Vincent.

"I'm having ham for supper," I said.

Silence.

"I bet you haven't eaten in ages. I would send you ham, only possibly there would be terrible shadowy ham-monsters running around. Delicious and terrible, they would haunt the roads and be badass."

"... was there a reason you called me, Yuffie?"

"No," I said.

Silence.

"I bet you're really bored, though."

Silence.

"Unless you have a pin-up in the coffin. _I bet you do have a pin-up._ Man, am I interrupting your private time? I could talk in a sexy voice. _Is this a sexy voice?_ Wait, this is totally gross. Gawd. I feel kind of dirty and molested."

"... this coffin is completely dark."

"Vincent, it is called the _power of imagination._ I'll help you. Okay, there's a hot blonde, standing on the beach, wearing this tiny pink polka-dotted bikini, and you get a smile at you all, 'Vincent, I am really, really hot for guys who wear black and totally heterosexual red velvet,' and - "

"**Yuffie.**"

" - and did I mention that it's Cloud - "

"**_Yuffie._** I'd prefer to spend this time alone, considering our situation. Thank you for any _misguided_ thought you may have had as to my entertainment." He hung up.

I waited twenty-five seconds before I called him again, drumming my fingers on the worn desk and drawing a happy man-eating flower on the blotting pad. "That was about sixty words more than you usually give me. I think you're really bored."

"Have you considered that they could be hearing our voices?"

"No, because the flea in Kalm? _No ears._ It had _antennae._ I mean, it can totally hear a hobo from sixty paces, but my sexy voice? Not likely."

"... there were other darknesses, Yuffie - "

"Did they have ears?"

"... no discernable ones. But - "

"What'd they look like? Also, _darknesses_? Haven't we cured you of this stuff yet? Because, dude, you sound a lot like Cloud, and he's busy making love to a concrete pylon."

"It's what they are." I could hear his voice; slightly shallow, a bit scratchy, slow and ponderous as he fired on only about one cylinder. "What they are... what they mean. Darknesses. Heartlessness... The mako has been calling. The Planet does not think... No. I don't hear the voice of the Planet."

"Regretting asking already, but what _do_ you hear?"

"Nothing," he said, "nothing at all."

Silence.

"The Junon Pizza answering machine is kind of less creepy to listen to than you are," I said. "Also, it gives me free pizza. You know, why don't you stop listening? Why don't you listen to _yourself_ once in a while? You and Cloud always have someone else's hand up your ass! Why are you down there anyway? Do you _like_ being in there? Do you _like_ waiting to die? Do you have any idea how totally shitty it is being in here, barring ham?"

"Yuffie," he said. "Do you know... can you comprehend... what it would be like if they received Chaos?"

"Um. Pretty lame?"

"Yes."

Another silence. I drew the man-flower eating a canned ham, and listened to the slow rasp of his breath. I timed; he only drew it in to talk, just a whisper, only taking in a lungful about each forty seconds. I imagined the blood slowly going to his heart, the aorta pushing it out just as slow, like they were on a broken tape. Then I stopped because it was putting me off my dinner.

"It's pretty lame here, too," I confessed. "Everyone's bitching at each other and Tifa cried on me and Cloud's crazy and being underground is _not_ ninja territory. You do not get underground ninjas. And Reeve is weird and nobody calls and I'm running out of romance novels and I want to go beat something up and I'm really afraid I'm going to be in here until I'm sixty-two."

"You won't be in there for fifty-nine years."

"You actually managed to make that sound not comforting."

"... I am not here as a shoulder."

"Even less comforting."

Silence.

"You know, they said there was going to be this kickass meteor shower from the sky. On the news. I was going to sit up on the roof and watch it."

"I cannot trust anything that comes from the sky," said Mr. Sadness.

"Vincent, are there ants in your coffin?"

"... what?"

"I'm just wondering if there are ants. They could crawl up you and eat your eyes while you're asleep."

"... there are no ants in my crypt."

"If there were you could eat them."

"I have never acted without my own hand," he said, rather suddenly. "I was never... a puppet. But my sins have always been my own. Nobody else's. I hear the voices. I do not _listen._"

"I know," I said. And: "Sorry."

Silence.

"At least you're not telling us we're going to die every five minutes."

"There isn't much hope for us, Yuffie."

"You were doing so well. Strike one."

"It's naive to think otherwise. I never said that we should lie down without any struggle."

"Do you - do you think Cid's dead? And Red?"

"... if they aren't alive, I can only hope they are dead."

I drew exclamation marks next to manflower. "Wow, that was pretty garbled."

"... yes."

"You know, it is so cute you actually had your cellphone when you locked yourself in here. Are you using it with your tongue?"

"... I can move my hands, Yuffie."

"Oh. _Ohhh._ I guess that's something. If you want any private time just say so."

"**Yuffie.**"

"Sorry, sorry." I drew a couple of criss-crosses on the paper, and came up with a bright idea. "Heh heh heh. I just thought of something _awesome_. I have a pen with me. Let's play tic-tac-toe. Okay, I am the noughts, and you are the crosses because you are all gothic and sad. I go first because I am noughts." I drew a big O in the middle of the grid. "I got center. Okay, where do you go?"

There was the _longest silence I ever heard from him_, possibly because I hadn't been around to hear him be silent those twenty-seven years he was having naptime, because he was probably pretty quiet then. "... cross on row one, square three."

He won tic-tac-toe. He also won Hangman until I started doing it in Wutaianese, when he _also won Hangman once he caught on_, until I started doing Hangman for obscure sexual terms, which he refused to do because he is no fun. It actually started to get a low _ding_ on the fun-o-meter, considering everything, and in comparison to the answerphone of Junon Pizza.

All I can say is this: he must have been **so bored.**

He was winning Hangman again (so I decided to cheat wildly change the word midway to _necrophilia_) when the horrible buzzer rang through from the kitchen to indicate it was dinner. "Well, that's the ham bell. I wish you were here with us having ham. Tifa's ham? It is awesome. Also, I win. G'night, Vincent."

"Goodnight, Yuffie."

"D'you want to play What Colour Is Barret's Underwear next time? If I discover he goes commando everyone loses. It is an adventure game."

"... goodnight, Yuffie."

* * *

You know what? You know what and it's so _lame_ - it's so _stupid_ - I still have this little scrap of blotting paper with that stupid tic-tac-toe game on it; isn't that _lame?_ This torn gross piece of foolscap all covered in old ink. Like, it's all falling apart and icky; I'm touching it right now, I put it in my wallet - okay, Cloud's wallet, I never bought a wallet in my life - and I can touch it right now, if I open it up and unzip the coin purse. It has lint and dust and some marbles I won off the triplets and some creepy foreign gil Leon gave me and the paper. I don't know why I kept it. Maybe I wanted to discern his amazing tic-tac-toe skills. Because I didn't even _win_ that one.

Isn't that just so stupid? I should throw it in the trash.

Tomorrow, anyway. Yeah.

* * *

But it's weird, though - at the end of every day and sometimes the middles (because like hell you could tell day and night there) I called him. Junon Pizza had lost the obvious gloss. Goodbye, Junon Pizza. After about a million tic-tac-toe games I actually started getting him to _talk._ Probably it was because he had spent like a week in that coffin already.

"Row two, square one."

"You can't make that move. It's illegal."

"... no, it's not. There are no illegal moves in this game except for marking on a used square, which that one isn't."

"Whatever, I'll let you have it because I'm so nice. Anyway, that's lame Midgar rules; this is Wutai rules. - Row one, square two. - You know, I have been meaning to ask you. How come you can speak Wutaianese?"

"... Turks learn a great deal of the language - "

"Vincent, you knew the words for _your uncle is a scabby vagina_. You did not learn it at _blah blah blah Turk school_."

"My mother," he said, and - "Row three, square one. I win."

"I hate you. I'm never playing tic-tac-toe again. What do you mean, your mother?"

"I mean my mother." I fiddled with the cord; it was always better to _embarrass_ him into trying to say something, before I used my magical power of many words to get the same result. "... My mother was second-generation. Wutaian."

"That means we are obviously of the same ancestral blood and you are cooler through this result. Vinnie Valentine, I adopt you, I adopt you, I adopt you. There, you can now wear our colours and shit. I can do this because I am Wutaian royalty. Also, you're pretty much now indebted to me and have to fight my wars and till my grain and that kind of thing. I think you also have to make offering to me each year. That means two types of command materia and one support."

"... do I have to be your peasant?"

"Yes. Hey, I have a peasant. In a box! This is so novel. I will think up all kinds of cool stuff for you to do later. Okay, wanna play Hangman? I thought up a bunch of new words you'll never get. This is because I made them up."

"... why don't we play chess?"

"You want to play chess?"

"I want to play chess."

"You don't think I'll cheat every move and manage to get the pieces on squares that reality never intended them to go?"

"Without a single doubt."

"Okay, let's play chess. On one condition. We play for money."

"Knowing my impending poverty, Yuffie, let's play chess."

I dug a horrible beaten-up board out from the games room, and set them up on the comm desk permanently. Our first game lasted ten minutes, where he checked me in nine, patiently listened to me argue for one, and repeated that I did not actually have a bishop still left in play, because he was a big jerk. Our second game lasted two days, which was to be the indicator of all future phone-chess games. I was pretty badass at chess, except for owing Vinnie forty million gil. I was wonderful once I realized that it was a bitchin' ninja game of tactics and despair. Also, he had a sense of _humour_ - him, not the game - him! Humour! He knew the funny! He would say _things that were amusing!_

He must have been **so bored**.

I left the phone on all the time after that, with him on a seperate line, on a speaker, so that if he wanted to wake up or talk or anything while I was in there reading the sequel to But You're A Turk! (We're Getting Married... But You're A Turk!) and eating horrible gluten snacks he could just clear his throat in a meaningful way. I also discovered that we had a lot of terrible discs of hot music from thirty years ago, when terrible music was in vogue, because Vincent actually recognised it and requested popular hits as we played death chess.

"You _cannot dance to this stuff_," I shrieked, during Livin' With A Heartache (In Sector Four). "You can't. This is _grandpa music._"

"Actually, this is kind of swingy," said Tifa, popping her head in the door. (She had just come from the gym, cheeks bright red, sweat running down her in a downpour: and she was _still glamorously gorgeous_. Bitch.) "I like it. My grandparents used to dance to this."

"See? _Proven,_" I hooted. "Vincent Valentine, terminal square."

"You have no taste."

"Oh! Oh! He is _ice burning_ me now with his wild zingers. This is abuse."

"I like this," said Tifa, merrily clicking her fingers and sashaying her shoulders. "It's classy. It reminds me of my first dance," she said wistfully. "I was twelve. Cloud wouldn't dance. He just stood in the corner. He only danced with me after everyone left, behind the doctor's house. I was wearing the _best_ dress."

"Okay, hold on, this is sounding chronically awful," I said. "You have a J cup and have been danced with _how_ any times?"

"Five," she said, and sighed so deeply her bra nearly popped. "I'm on the shelf now."

"That's okay, Vincent's like ninety and on the shelf, we can marry you two off."

"I don't think he'd have me."

"... my apologies, Tifa. I'm a bachelor."

"Hey, this is Livin' Wit' A Heartache," said Barret, taking up most of the doorway. "I think my _mama_ danced to this damn shit. At her goddamn _weddin'._"

That made Tifa laugh, leaning back in the other side of the doorway, what two percent there was. "What, were you _there?_"

"Are you dirtyin' the name of Morina Wallace?" he growled. "Jes' you take that back, 'cos I was born in _wedlock_ with a preacher an' all the trimmin's."

"Barret, Tifa has only been danced with five times in her life," sez me. "Please fix this, she is a square."

She laughed - Gawd, her laugh was beautiful - and he _bowed_ to her, all gross denim shorts and vest and ten million chocolate-covered muscles and suddenly he was lovely, he was beautiful, they were both so so pretty in those stupid cracky tunnel-lights - he put his gun-arm very gently at her hip as she laughed so hard her knees shook, he pulled her out to the corridor and nearly hit a passing accountant and she put one hand on his shoulder and the other dwarfed in his and all the dumb remnants of their fight were over. They swayed down the corridor in the stupidest dance, the worst quickstep ever, dancing all the way down to the arms center. Livin' With A Heartache moved to Mako Morning, and I turned it off, and then there was nothing but Vincent's forty-second breath.

"For your edification, that was them failing to dance," I announced. "Also I think they may be Doing It."

"They're lonely," he said, surprising me with his vast knowledge that humans had more than one emotion and that emotion might be 'poker face', and then - "Young love."

"Thanks, Grandpa."

"Knight on a-five to c-six, capture your pawn," he said after a pregnant pause, and that was that.

* * *

I eventually found the Reevecave, because I followed him out of boredom and he forgot to close the door; it was a slider and whispered a breath of an inch before closing, whereupon I slid in my little finger and peeked in the crack. I don't know why I did it that day. He'd been acting weird; pushed around his breakfast, not done much with his lunch, and generally fiddled with his tie in a manner suspicious. The Reevecave was just an office with a difference; it had a computer, but that was it. Every surface was strewn with tools and bits of wire and greasy nuts (hee hee, greasy nuts) and screws (hee - oh, you get it) and those plastic things that look like candy but tragically aren't with wires sticking out, and transistors, and resistors, and every kind of ist-or, and what looked like the most retarded gimp cage I have ever seen. It was a weird skeleton thing, all metal and wires; after examining it closely I realised it was more of an AI machine. There was a headpiece and handpieces and footpieces and buttpieces, and everything - I'm sorry, the stupid pen's a little shaky, it's just my hand - and something that looked like you might put your teeth in it. He turned on the computer: and he moved to the tiny bar-fridge and took out a packet of needles. I had not actually known that Reeve was a blossoming druggie, so this got my attention.

He shoved mess out the way and put the needles down; he took a greasy belt from a drawer and wrapped it around his arm, tightening it professionally with his teeth as he examined it for a vein. Then he took the needle - and as if he'd done it a million times before - jabbed it into one of the failing veins at his elbow. The mixture looked bright yellow, and was either poison or Kool-Aid.

When he put down the needle, he knew I was there: he was jerking, shivering spastically, unperturbed by the tic in his eye as he slipped his arms into his metal skeleton-thing. "Come in, Yuffie. It - it doesn't matter."

"Gross," I said, sliding the door open. "_Gross._"

"I - can you - a favour - _I shoulda known you were there, you nosy brat,"_ he said, and it was Cait Sith's tone, and not Cait Sith's voice, and you could have driven a car through his pupils. It modulated as he slipped his hands into the holders, as the computer began to monitor something and beep warningly, as he slipped his head in. "If you could just - _make yourself useful for once, okay? Geez!_"

"I will never be naked again," I said.

"Who wants to see YOU naked? Big stuff going down tonight, Kisaragi! _Big_ stuff!" He was gone now. He was giving me a carnival grin, all teeth, and Reeve was no longer there; he had disappeared to another sector of his brain, and I think he only used drugs to help him get it out. "This is the _badass_ portion of this rollercoaster ride. This is Operation Alpha! Operation Omega! Let's see how those turkeys handle this one - get your chubby butt to the comm room and give us all vid, why don'tcha? Get the others! This is prime-time television! Wait, wait, let me give you your fortune first."

"If you do I may have nightmares forever."

Reeve's feet twitched. "Okay, here we go! ... Elena, hand it over, okay. It's for the good of the people. - Yuffie's star is hideously unlucky! Her mother's also so fat that her pictures gotta be taken by satellite!"

"_Dead,_" I shrieked, as I ran down the corridor. "He is _dead! So dead!_ Tifa! Barret! Tiiiii-fa! **Tiiii-faaaa!**"

Cloud was already there, in the communications room, as I flicked on switches and rang the buzzers; as Tifa came in her bathrobe with the little Shinra logo on the breast, brunette hair hanging long and stringy down her back, as Barret came with Marls scampering after - as I carefully pushed the chess board to the back desk, and slammed down the vid button.

" - yeah, and then I said, 'your mother's also so fat that her pictures gotta be taken by satellite' - "

"Aww, that's HILARIOUS! Ha ha ha!"

There was the low, grinding grunt of helicopter blades as the screen kicked in, right after the sound, of Reno laughing in the front seat as Rude had the controls and Elena pissed around with a machine at the middle of the craft floor. Cait's mog straightened the camera - whatever it was - at the back and waved to us, as Reno made V-signs over his head and Elena waved jerkily from behind Cait.

"Hey! Hey! Can you guys see out?" It was dusk through the windows. There were far-off streaks like fairy lights - "Meteor shower, still going after last night! Woohoo! Make a wish!"

"That Rude would put out," said Reno. (He looked like he had not changed his clothes in a week. None of them. They were bloodied and dirty and Elena had her arm in bandages. Reno's sleek metrosexual hairstyle was coming apart, red hair everywhere. Only Rude's hair was still awesome because he was bald, but he was starting to look kind of stubbly.) This caused him one terrible punch from the pilot seat. "_I meant 'Lena. I meant 'Lena._ I am _not gay._ No gay. I am thinking of her breasts, right now." The camera rocked mildly as Elena punched the back of his seat. "Geez, can everyone just _lay off._"

"Can you tell where we are? Ten gil for the guesser!"

"The temple," said Cloud, in the back. "Her temple."

"Ding ding ding! I owe you ten gil, remind me."

"What the hell you doin' _there?_"

"This, my friends, is the _mission!_ The bugs all started here at this point!"

"Came right out the damn temple," said Rude, for once in his life.

"Correct! They haven't been coming from anywhere else. So we're doing this the old-fashioned way. _Fire._ It's taken us a while to get here - these fleas can _fly!_ Big ones! Small ones! Winged ones! Magic ones! Ain't no end to this! It was worse than we thought!"

"You're dead," said Cloud. "The stars are falling."

"We can't," said Elena. "Reno can't die a virgin." The cockpit was immediately filled with hooting and jeering, and a front-seat "_- shut your bitchy, trampy whore mouth._"

"The stars are falling," said Cloud.

"Not tonight, Strife," murmured Barret, eyes glued to the screen. "Not jes' now."

"Four o'clock, bogey squadron." Pilot.

Elena clambered over the contraption on the floor and pulled herself to the gunner's pit, popping the speakers with squeaky gunfire as she shot the hell out of whatever was getting in their way.

"We've done a couple poison sprays," Reno said proudly, leaning over to the camera. "It stuns 'em for a while. We need clear skies for this, AVALANCHE!"

"It's just about ready, Elena! Timed and going!"

"Yes, Mr. President!"

"I like it when you call me Mr. President," said Cait coyly. "If you called me Mr. Cat we could date."

"Target lock," said Rude.

"The stars are falling." It was so soft, just barely a whisper, dead and cold. "So close, and nearly open."

Elena pulled herself back from the gun-pit, one arm hanging gaily loose, and pulled herself down near a little keypad in the metal. "Ready to go."

The last red-headed Turk pumped his fist in the air. "Fire in the _hole,_ bitches!"

Elena slammed her fist down on something - knowing Reeve, probably a big red button. There was a terrible metal grinding sound from underneath the helicopter. Cait, crown askew, danced off the Mog momentarily to fiddle with the camera; a new and very blurry window opened, the under-hatch, as we watched the helicopter give birth to something large and metal and ungraceful. It was a bomb; with a little propeller; it started whirring, pushing the thing towards the shadowy forest and the remnants of the temple below. Elena pulled herself back into the gunpit, crackling the sound with gunfire once more.

"Cover it, but just don't _hit it_, for God's sake," said Reno, offscreen.

The helicopter moved back and around, circling the island from a distance - we saw the nauseating spin of it and my mouth was dry - and suddenly I was cheering, Barret was cheering, all of the Turks with Rude included were yelling its descent on as it went down, down, down.

There was just one second - I saw two black things dart across the front of the helicopter, buffeted by the slipstream - and there was fire, slow fire, fire blooming everywhere as it rocked the helicopter and ostensibly destroyed the Temple of the Ancients and Aerith's lake for ever -

"The door is open," said Cloud. "The way is clear."

It all went dark.

It went dark through the fire - the mushroom cloud of smoke and steam was flickering through darkness, something eternally dark, lifting the fire up as it clung. It was dark. It was _so dark_. The mog shrieked - the first sound I had ever heard it make - in that terrible, greasy, obscene dark, as something hideous rose from the island - towered up, holding that blooming fire, eating it as it ate at it, all smoke and steam and darkness. "Mother of _fuck,_" Reno was saying, "mother of fuck," and the tips of the forest was on fire but that was it. The temple was broken and it rose, rose unimaginably, fed on that terrible darkness until it as level with the helicopter and

there was a man

"_Get outta there,_" Barret hollered. "Get the hell - "

He wore a black coat. The huge shadow-creature was a medusa of tendrils, faceless in comparison, an empty angle in his center where the fire still burnt - ungainly hands, huge long hands, long ugly tendrils crushing the forest beneath him. His eyes were yellow lamplights in the dark - and there was the man, just a man, blurring the cameras, Elena shrieking in incoherent rage as she pumped bullets into the both of them as hard as she could. It hit neither, or had no effect, both and nothing.

"Don't try to attack it! Get out of there! _Turn around!_" Tifa.

"Aerith," said Cloud, "why didn't you tell me?"

Darkside reached out with his gargantuan hand, and took the helicopter in the arch of his palm as if it were a live thing to be held; and the screen flickered, the camera buzzed, and all we could see were lines of static as the blades cut uselessly into the hand and the steel frame gurgled as it was crushed away, the sudden intimation of live wires and stopped blades and goo. I remember how Rude dipped that joystick just before - how you could see Reno's ponytail fall apart from that disintergrating rubber band he wore, all bright auburn shivering down his shoulders as he moved to half-stand out of his seat, just it all caved in - the blackness of everything except the tiny pinpoints of the control lights, and

The silence was the worst. They never screamed.


	5. v: vomiting dusk

**A/N:** My deepest butthurt apologies. This was one of the most difficult chapters to write. I feel as though I have just completed the Longest Prologue That Ever Was. Mad props to Negative Creep for letting me make crappy and oblique references to "Of Captains And Teacups", and this chapter's for her.

* * *

**But That Was In Another Country**

* * *

**v. -** vomiting dusk

* * *

It's kind of funny - I tried to talk about it to Tifa later, a lot later, and she tried to tell me _why_ Barret broke down and shot out all the windows in the comm room - what the Turks had _meant,_ really meant. I mean, there they were to me: King Silence, Queen Retard and Princess Got A Gun. Rude, Reno, Elena, three parts snazzy suit and one part bullet. Anyone from Midgar had this crazy little portion of their head that was scared of the Turks, and _really_ scared of the Turks, apparently even when Reno stuck cigarettes up his nose. It was probably a holdover from the days when Vincent tied up his stylish tie, or something, but - Aerith, you'd understand, wouldn't you? The Turks dying was not just an end of an era, it was the end of some kind of steadfast belief that Turks _got the job done_. The sign of the end when even the cockroaches die. I hadn't been there when they blew up chunks of Midgar, or kidnapped you, and I admit that I wasn't even sperm back when the Turks were probably totally scary and I didn't know Tseng from a bar of soap, but Turks dying was a _sign_. A sign that wasn't Turks dying.

And Reno was all over the helicopter. I remember that. I remember that. He was all over the helicopter.

It's kind of funny and it's kind of retarded: because I don't even feel like I have the right to mourn them, it's just - people say "Oh, that was the way they wanted to go!" and _like hell it was_. That assumes _any of them wanted to go_. The Turks would have lived forever.

I feel stupid for writing all that. Also my pen that writes in three colours is running out, and I should go steal another from Huey. I feel it is not a crime to steal from three giant baby ducks. No jury would convict me. Hell, even Leon just says, - okay, Leon says "Pay them," but I can tell that inside his heart he supports me. Gawd, anyway, what would he know? His fiancee used to fire dogs from her arms and he doesn't know how many belts he needs to hold up his pants, he probably thinks that's normal.

Anyway, I need to take a breath.

Goodnight, Blade Kisaragi. Goodnight, goodnight. Goodnight.

* * *

Two of the accountants died that week. I don't even know why, they were having a fight, they started to accountant-brawl and one stabbed the other - Stabbo'ed went into the freezer alongside the other guy, and then we had to lock the other one in his room because we didn't know what the hell to do with him only then he hung himself too because Barret let him keep his shoelaces on purpose. Reeve, who was usually the voice of quiet accountancy respect, was _out_ - up in his crazy machine in the Reevecave, shaking and moaning and rattling, just living in one long seizure. I guess he'd never died up close before. He wasn't Cait Sith and he wasn't Reeve Tuesti, he was just this twitchy guy we had to strap to the bed, which brought our AVALANCHE count of crazy people at least temporarily up to two. Cloud would go and sit next to him so that Tifa could spoonfeed them both vacuum-packed chicken broth without having to go look around and waste time, and there they were, our own little mental ward. Reeve was more interesting but Cloud could go to the bathroom by himself, which put both of them about equal coolness. Cloud would sit there in a girl's t-shirt because he put on whatever I gave him and stare at Reeve, who just kind of wore ropes and a bedsheet, which now that I think about it is probably why Reeve didn't really want to wake up. Tifa didn't even sigh blankly at Cloud wearing a unicorn riding across his chest in a halo of gritty sparkles. She didn't sigh at _anything_.

It broke both of them for a little while - Barret and Tifa, I mean; they just played nursemaid because it was what they knew, what they'd always done before, and the accountants and secretaries seethed and panicked among themselves, and I locked myself in the communications room with Marlene and candy corn and Vincent. What else was there to do? Reeve had been the one to say, _I know what to do, this is how it is,_ and we followed him because he at least had radio connections and a big concrete barn under the earth. We have followed for _much less_. We followed Cloud because he had a good determined face. Okay, I followed Cloud because I thought there might be money involved, but there might have been money with his good determined face, and - who do you follow? What do you do? What the _hell_ do you do?

"Rook to d-five wishing we were playing anything else in the whole wide world, capture your knight," I said one evening - damn if I can remember what evening it was, because back then I lost sight of the days. I'd look up what day it was on the computer and say "Wake up! It's Monday!" or whatever hilarious comment I could think of to him ("wake up, it's Monday" not really being among the hilarious comment list) and Vincent didn't even complain, just said "thank you", as if me giving him the day was as good as coffee. For a lot of it it was just him, me and Marlene, and more him and me, considering the fact that Marlene was more interested in magazines about horses and cutting out her favourite pictures. (Marls slept in a trundle bed behind me, full of nightmares and little-girl snores. I once caught her forcing Vincent to sing her a twee little song about a spider who couldn't get his retarded self up a drainpipe and found himself at the bottom again, full of existential angst and dying in a puddle, or at least that's totally how he sung it.)

"Are you sure?"

"I hate it when you say 'are you sure', you're just trying to psyche me out."

"I just wanted to make sure... that you were sure, that is."

"You are _trying to psyche me out,_ because I'm nearly winning for once. And I think you're kind of pissing with me. - Want to hear a joke? Actually, you have to listen, you've got no option, I can say whatever I like and you can't stop me. Okay, here it is. Knock, knock."

"..."

"No, you have to. I'm serious. Knock, knock."

"... ... ... who's there."

"An interrupting chocobo."

"... an interrupting chocobo wh - "

"WARK." (He had to listen to five minutes of me laughing hysterically, pounding the communications board in self-congratulation, spraying a fine film of candy corn on the screens, etc, etc.) "Your move! You can take as long as you like. I know it is absolutely hard to play when you are _crippled with laughter_. I know my lighthearted ways see through to your _very soul_ and make it hard for you to think, which is why I nearly won last time. Well. I would have won, but I was being nice to you. It's all you have to go by, living each day on my harsh defeats. Vinnie, I've been worrying about this a teensy weensy amount - "

"Bishop to e-three," he said. And: "Check." And: "... You owe me four million gil."

"Hey. Hey. Stop counting your gil, I can get out of this." (I probably couldn't have.) "Just you _wait._ Can you wait?"

"I think I'm getting good at it."

"You know, you're getting kind of funny, too." Possibly this was the reason why Vincent was at least a million times more entertaining than Cloud; he sometimes cracked jokes. The jokes were pretty bad. Like, they were pretty much on the level of jokes told to you by your uncle on your birthday. That is not an exceptionally high rating, but it was higher than Cloud's, which at that point wasn't even on the level of jokes told by your grandpa. He also had a really nice voice. Shut up. I mean, it... it was kind of slow and he had this tiny bit of accent if you listened, just enough to fill a thimble, and it was nearly as deep as Barret's, and he talked in a long and kind of drawly way that at first bored me and then put me to sleep, which are two different things. This one time I asked him to try to get me some sleep by saying random words at me - which he did, which was probably the amazing thing - and I snored off somewhere during _juxtaposition_ and _remonstrate_. (Juxtaposition? What a word nerd.) "Do you want to be my apprentice?"

"No."

"You lamer. Why not?"

"... 'Interrupting Chocobo' helped cement that, Yuffie."

"What_ever_. Anyway, Vincent, like I was saying, I was thinking - "

"Are you ill?"

"Gawd, I teach you to be a little funny and now you can't _shut up_ with it. Vinnie, I've been worrying about this a teensy weensy amount lately, but aren't you kind of starving to death?"

"No," he said.

"Whew! Okay, thank you for that, because I'm like, 'well, I'm sitting here with my bag full of candy corn and maybe I'm torturing you on accident with my crunching or I don't know, candy corn is pretty awful,' but - "

"I'm dehydrating," he said. "I have no water. My body can only survive so long while I'm like this."

I sort of sat there in stunned silence, with a mouth full of candy-corn and all the little bits dribbling out: and I choked a little on it - on both that, and on the crappy candy corn, until he said "Chew," and I did so that I wouldn't die live on-air with him. Well, actually, Marlene probably knew enough to wake up and give me CPR, but I'd been eating a lot of lime-flavour candy corn which she didn't like so it was touch and go as to whether she'd do it with my nasty lime-flavoured lips. And there he was, and there I was, and there were the facts spread out in front of us both. "You're dying. Oh, Gawd, Vinnie, you're _dying_."

"... Yuffie - "

"You're dying. You're _dying right here_. You were dying through Twenty Questions. _You're dying now._"

"Yuffie, calm down."

"How can you tell me to c-calm down? You're dying and I bet your ass is fifty feet from a bucket of old water, or whatever, _whatever_ - you're stuck in a box and I bet you're getting bedsores and - you're _dying!_"

"You're going to wake up Marlene." (He just sounded tired. He sounded so tired - how did I miss that? He'd sounded tired for days.)

"I _don't care,_" I said, but I did, and I lowered my voice to an angry saliva hiss. "Your _stupid cellphone_ hasn't run out of batteries but you're _dying?_ How is that fair? How the hell is that fair? This is stupid! _Everything_ is stupid! You know that? We should've, we should've done what Cloud said and met this head-on, we should've - this is _so gawd-damn stupid_ - "

"Either I go into a deep hibernation, or I drink," he said. "I have a choice. Once I am in that sleep, I will be there for three months. Once I drink, I have to leave, because they will have found me. Do you understand?"

"I understand this _sucks_ - "

"My safety was never guaranteed if I did the former. There are three hundred and sixty-three bullets in this house, if I can get to them. The Death Penalty self-reloads, but it's a handgun - "

"How long?"

"... I have nineteen hours to make a choice."

Wiping my mouth left sickly green trails along my fingers, settling into the cracks of my knuckles that I'd all cut up walking on my hands in the gym. I was shaking out of anger and out of fear and wanting to _wake up:_ back on that snowy path that lead to Tifa's bar and Kalm, not caring about anything except the frozen candybar in my linty pocket. Of course I'd thought about getting out and making a heroic rescue of Red and Cid and Shera and Wutai, and Vinnie, like all we had to do was all we had to do the _last_ time - give Cloud his sword and let him do the thousand slashes. We solved everything _before_ by drinking salty gross water in the Northern Crater and just suffering a bit, like everything was determined by who drank the crappy water and suffered. And I was pissed off at Cloud like he'd started the whole thing just by seeing it, not that there weren't good reasons to be pissed off at Cloud, and I was pissed off at _you_ - because where were you? Where was Holy? With you gone, did the Planet just not _care?_ Without you, was everything just charcoal and candy corn and dribble, and how was that fair _anyway?_ You didn't die for that! You never would've died for that!

"I'm coming to get you," I said, in one embarrassing blurt.

For some reason, that really pissed him off, because he said sharply: "Don't you ever think practically?"

"Stop treating me like some kind of _baby_." (It was so stupid, down there, how him just being rude made my cheeks burn and my eyes hurt. As if that spelled anything other than 'baby' in big blinking neon lights.) "I'm a _ninja._ I can - I can slip through! They won't notice one person, right? I can take Cloud's motorbike! I could take the truck. We can ride in style. One person could spring you, and - then - "

"And then what?"

" - then..."

"After you leave a sealed cave and make the trek - across an **ocean** - through untold peril - " (_Peril?_ What a word nerd) " - on foot across the Nibel mountains, in the dead of winter? Spending weeks walking it, or little less on a truck that can't go up a mountain? What then, Yuffie? Or are you going to think up a plan on the way?"

"I taught you to be _funny,_" I blubbered, gone, wasted, ripped to shreds without much effort, "not _sarcastic_."

There was a silence where I tried to stop crying and failed, laying my head down on the desk and on the blotting pad and knocking off half the chess pieces and sobbing out of pure frustration. Nothing had ever seemed further than him, then, than Nibelheim, halfway over the world on the next continent where he lay dying in a box. I felt sorry for him and then sorrier for me and then sorry for him again, and his silence was a little sorry too. We were all more than a little pathetic back then.

"I'm so scared of dying," I said, and I wept so hard that I was just one long wet hiccup. "And not just scared of _me_ dying but scared of _everybody_ dying, and you're just being a jerk because you know I'm scared of you dying too. I'm scared of - of having to put B-barret in the freezer with the popsicle accountants, and I'm scared of being scared, and hiding under this desk 'til I die, and I'm scared of being alone because Tifa's giving me her powdered egg and stuff and her wrists are so skinny..." One long dribbly sniff. "I go to bed terrified and I wake up terrified! You think I don't know how bad this is _but I do._ I _fucking_ do, with a capital fuh-huck."

"Yuffie," he said, and it wasn't not gentle, "get into bed."

You know when you start crying and you just can't stop? I was fighting for each weeping, gritty breath as I unfolded my own trundle bed and put it next to Marlene's, sobbing in that way when you're just trying to be quiet about it, seeing everything through an eyelid-hot squeeze of tears as I shucked off my shoes and crawled underneath the covers. I was crying too hard to argue, which pretty much tells you how bad I was at that point, just bawling into my pillow and curling my toes up in the blankets without bothering to get undressed.

"It's worse when you're nice," I said, and cried harder at the speaker on the desk. I tried my best to enter into some kind of crying athletics, long-distance and sprint crying, big gulping breaths. I had lost absolutely every tiniest bit of my classy wit and snappy comebacks, and I was pretty much just four years old and Marlene, sitting in that big office chair and howling my guts out. I had no plan and no faith and no nothing, and the too-thin mattress was sagging underneath me. "You're not even b-being nice. You just want me to be quiet. You're a big stupid jerk."

"When I was thirteen I wanted to play the guitar in a band," he said, absolutely unexpectedly.

"That don't make no damn sense," I said, in my best Barret, through a hurricane of sniffles. But it was a present or a tranquilizer or both, and I took it because those things from him were so rare and he knew it: "... why didn't you?"

"... my father worked for Shinra."

"Oh," I said. And: "Really a guitar?"

"Yes."

"_Really_ a guitar?"

"Yes."

"Gawd, you were so lamesauce," I said, and I eventually cried myself to sleep because I was right, because he couldn't even say sorry but sometimes gentleness is worse.

* * *

I only managed a handful of hours. I'm not saying it was any kind of sixth sense, because I could have slept through Meteor, but I was a little awake anyway - first taking Marlene to pee, and then spending my time nursing my headache from crying too hard. My face was all sticky and swollen and red and I couldn't remember my dreams. I was only drowsing when I heard the crackle from the 'phone; and then I heard something else, which made my heart stop and sink somewhere down into my intestines.

He pushed the lid of the coffin off.

The trundle bed closed up on me and ate my foot as I stumbled over to him, skidding on the tiles; and I scrambled with the headset and flicked the speaker-switch, all groggy arms and legs and slept-in clothes. There wasn't any preamble as I heard him suck in the air of the tiny catacomb cave. "... Yuffie, please tell Tifa that I will be going dark."

"Vincent - "

"If I find a way to safely maintain contact, I will do so. I'm heading for Cosmo Canyon; there is too much open space to make an attempt on Rocket Town."

"Vinnie," I blathered, and - forever winning the gold medal for Most Pathetic, not knowing what to say, my tongue fuzzy and welted from too much candy corn and too much crying, somersaulting into Total Fail - "You'll never know what happened to Biff and Shirilla's secret baby now."

"I do not think," he said, (ignoring totally the plight of Biff and Shirilla's secret baby, but who cared) "that we should be things in cages. You made that... clear." There was a noise like him checking the safety on his gun, the tinny tinkle of bullets. His breath was all regular now, heartbeat to lungs, and after long weeks of the forty-second sigh it sounded to me like hyperventilation. "Yuffie, I'm going to turn off my cellphone now."

I wanted to say: I'm sorry I ever called you depressing because even if you are it's okay, it's okay to be depressing because being depressing is okay. I'm sorry I made fun of you wearing red and black all the time. I'm not sorry I made fun of your pointy witchypoo shoes. I'm sorry for giving you the dribble glass at the hotel in the Gold Saucer. I'm sorry I stole your materia. I'm sorry for prank calling your cellphone and asking for Seymour Butts thirty-six times. I'm sorry you never got to play guitar in a bar in the dark and become a total rockstar like you wanted.

What I said was: "Don't forget to use the bathroom."

(This is a really shitty last message.)

He didn't say "Goodbye, Yuffie," and I don't know whether I wanted him to or not. I don't think I could have handled _goodbye_; I don't think I handled not having it, either. I guess it was punishment. All my life I had been leaving other people, ever since I put on my shoes and took my first snazzy step out of Wutai for ever and ever, and then I fell into a million flyaway Kisaragi pieces when anybody had the balls to do it to me instead. All I got from Vincent was just one breath and him turning off the cellphone and the comm center making beeping noises at me, and all I could think of was that he was readying his gun, and opening up the door to the catacombs with his heart beating out a message that he was a Vincent Valentine all-you-can-eat Chaos buffet. With all the Heartless suddenly pricking up their antennae and crawling towards him and oozing down those spiral stairs; him straightening his arm and narrowing those red eyes, calmly taking aim in the dark -

When Tifa came in with her absolutely gross hot milk for Marlene and me, she found me with my head in my arms and making tiny noises like an abandoned dog. But she didn't make me drink the milk, which is the main thing. She just held me, held me and held me, swept her legs in behind me in the sagging office chair and held me in her lap like a little girl. She rocked me in her arms and rubbed my arms in a slow rhythm: _pat pat, rub, pat pat,_ like a mother with a baby, until Marlene woke up and we all sat in the squeaking bed and held each other. Marlene took the rubber bands out of her hair and gave me her pigtails, chubby fingers threading through my hair. I didn't think then that I'd ever cried so hard.

"Let's pray," Tifa said suddenly, and we arranged ourselves on our knees by the trundle bed. Three pairs of white arms, Tifa's tiny wrists, Marlene's magic-marker elbows.

"Who to?" said Marlene doubtfully. (Before I could ask it. Da Chao gods, you have never filled me with Great Inspiration.)

"It doesn't matter who to," Tifa said. "It matters who for. Let's pray for Vincent."

(I think she thought you were listening. I wonder if you were.)

After a couple of helpless moments of clasped hands, I gave up. Marlene had her eyes squinted shut and her cheeks were puffed out bright pink, so if she got prayer points for exertion the Planet was gonna have to give her full marks. I don't think it made any of us feel better, but it gave me long enough to duck my head and take my breath and stop myself crying, give myself a little dignity before facing everything else. "Tiffers," I said. "Back in Midgar, what'd you used to pray for?"

She thought about this. I waited for something really solemn and profound and moving.

"Biggs' chocolate-dipped frozen bananas."

Stupid thing is, I didn't even pray for him. I just made hot, horrid little promises to myself that that I was going to get up and leave like he did, walk out into the dark and never come back, shoot my gun into the air with bullets that never came down.

* * *

What Tiff'd actually come in for, I learned later, was not to force calcium down my throat (that was just a bonus) but to tell me that Reeve had regained consciousness for some time that morning. He'd screwed up his brain somehow; he couldn't walk properly, as if he had floppy little rubber limbs, and it took twenty agonizing minutes for him to stubbornly feed himself cold cereal from a bowl. He wasn't in any position to do anything, which meant leadership of AVALANCHE probably fell to Barret Wallace again. (Apparently chain of command meant me leading anything only happened when everybody else was dead, and even then, only if Marlene said so.) Even slurring, twitching and flailing, Reeve was still on a better level than Cloud, who just sat on his stool wearing his t-shirt emblazoned with DON'T YOU LOVE PUPPIES! and stared morosely at the pipes. It wasn't even enough to think that life sucked any more: we were mouldering down there, stripping our skins off and dimming our lightbulbs until we weren't even _us_. We were dying, too, from no hope and no light and too much corned beef. I was sick of all those things, and it took me about ten minutes to get even sicker from no Vincent paying unwilling attention to me all hours of the day to keep me sane.

There were terrible smudges under Reeve's eyes, and he looked sunken and waxy like a dead thing. His beard looked even more like a poodle's armpit than ever, until Barret came and shaved it off so that Tifa could delicately wipe his chin better without having to deal with thirty million caught food particles in it. He looked about twenty-three after this treatment, gazing at everyone with accusing eyes for the unapologetic murder of his facial hair. Cid with stubble looked rakish. Reeve with stubble looked like a gawky clerk who yearned to ask out the most popular girl in Accounts Receivable, and was gonna buy a black leather jacket for the occasion in case the combination of both things made her agree to go to the milkshake bar with him.

"You can grow a big twirly mustache," I told him. (He looked damply unimpressed.) "Maybe you could build a robot, and the robot could be the mustache."

"Stop gettin' these guys sicker," said Barret, and did something so horrible with a bag and a tube attached to Reeve that years were taken off my life. To his credit, President Victim just looked pensive and pained and dignifiedly weary of it, as if bags and tubes had been in his horoscope the moment the Turks had left his side. "Damn if you ain't the biggest blabbermouth in the whole wide world."

I don't know how Barret bore it, because I could only bear about twenty minutes of flying the spoon into Cloud's munchy-munch airship-hangar at a time. Years of suffering had apparently made Tiff and him perfect for the job, but I still had my youthful gumption and desired better things in life. My first job on the agenda was taking a hairpin to the door that locked through to the main security room, the one that Reeve still held the key for, which was my hope of getting out of there: I just lost the hairpin. There was also the option of building a raft, but then the question of what I would do with a raft once it was finished, and whether I shouldn't just build my own cushion-fort coffin and wait gloomily for death. This is what things were like down there.

I also broke my promise of never going into the communications room again by going back in there pretty much that night. Calling Vincent's number got me nothing better than a recorded, "We're sorry, but this user is not taking calls!" which didn't even net me some free pizza. What kind of person doesn't put in their own personalised answering message? (Answer: Vincent Valentine.) I don't know why I called it, kept on calling it, persisted on calling it, persisted in setting up the chess board exactly how we had been playing it, but I did, only I got tired of myself after this fairly damn quickly so I went back to what I'd been sent in there for in the first place all those weeks ago.

My father didn't pick up. Neither did Red, though that might've been because he had no hands. But my hands got all clammy when I punched in Cid's number -

_rrrng rrrng rrrng_

- and it actually connected. 

"Cid?" I shrieked, as somebody picked up, actually feeling a bit like my old self again - "Cid! Where the hell are you?! Do you have all your arms and legs and stuff? Why didn't you pick up when I called you like a million times before? Are you okay? Yeah, you're okay! Cid, I - "

"Ah," said a voice, faintly. "I thought you were the Captain."

My excitement sank, which was pretty unfair on her. I'm so sorry. "Shera? Shera, that you?"

It sounded like she was speaking from down the other side of a long, long tunnel, and in a kind of daze all the way. It sounded like it was so hard for her to talk, like every word was a kind of dreamy agony. "Maybe it was wrong to think... was it wrong? It's not as if I doubted... I wasn't brought up to doubt."

Okay, in my opinion Shera was always a little bit dim, but her plug wasn't even in the socket at this point. "Shera? Planet to Shera? Hello in there? This is Yuffie. You know me. I helped you take cigarette butts out of the sugar bowl. I once ate all the gelatin pudding in your fridge and Cid tried to make me be sick on the next-door neighbour's dog. You remember that. You remember me. Where's Cid, Shera? Where are _you?_ Are you in Rocket Town?"

There was silence on the end, and for a moment I was afraid I'd lost her. Then, still faraway: "Yes. And I finished the launch. Could you tell him that, please?"

"Shera, I don't know where the hell Cid _is_."

More urgently, as if I hadn't said anything: "You have to tell him. The Captain needs to know. You have to tell him - you have to tell him... there's not enough fuel to do what we had originally planned, you see. You have to let him know. You have to let him know that the keys are in the flowerpot and that I always held him in the highest regard. I can do that. I don't feel so selfish now. My father always said: no loose ends to trip up on. If the only honour I can do him is going down with my ship..."

"Shera, stop it. Take a chill pill. This is _so-oo_ not the time for you to be doing a Cloud Strife on me."

It was a whisper: "Cid, I have you lashed to the mast."

"Shera, you're scaring me, okay? Shera, where is he?"

"The keys are in the flowerpot," she repeated patiently, as if **I** was the one speaking fluent and satisfied Crazy Bitch, and hung up before I could do anything. I immediately set her on redial like six times but she never picked up again. This is one of the things in my life which I think is _absolutely and totally not my fault_.

"You sh-hould have kept her talking," Reeve said to me later, in his impatient slur, as I watched him spill Fort Condor Corn Thin fragments right down his front and had to brush them away off his chest. There was powdered corn dust caught in his spidery dark stubble. "You could have... confirmed... where she was."

"Are you kidding? Tifa doesn't let me push those buttons. Hell, _Marlene_ doesn't let me push those buttons." I guffawed broadly, not really feeling the guffaw, and again wiped away Corn Thin shrapnel as he munched his way through the cracker. "I would've broken the computer. Hey, is that your wallet? Can I look at it?"

"If... you absolutely have to."

I opened his wallet and made hissing _here is your gil!_ sounds, because I immediately regretted opening his wallet: inside it he had a little photo of him and Elena and Reno and Rude in there, and Reno was giving him the bunny-ears and had one leg popped up like Shirilla on the cover of her romance novel. Elena had her arms draped around Reeve and was giving him finger-glasses. I hurt all over again, like it was seeping over my scalp and fingertips, and he didn't look at me but just ate his Corn Thin. Also, Reno was totally more than passingly redheadedly attractive once you took everything that was Reno out of the equation and just left his appearance, but that made me hurt worse than ever. Reno was _not hot_ in _any lifetime_. I filched Reeve's small change just to give him something else to think about and went back to watching him.

"Don't do that," he said irritably, and he tried so hard to eat his Corn Thin nicely that I almost wasn't entertained. "Strife looks at me... all damn day."

"Boy, you're grouchy," I said. "Probably because Barret knows it _every time you pee_. Okay, I'd be pretty pissed off if that happened to me, really. Also is it just me, or has he spent the longest time in the bathroom ever?"

"He does-sn't like the sound of the pipes," said Reeve, and swallowed, and pretty much gave up on eating anything else. I brushed him free of crumbs, and he just sighed at me. "Sits in there."

"He sits on the can listening to the pipes?"

"Are you looking to me for a full explanation?"

"_Why?_"

"I built walls, Yuffie," he said. "I built four walls... I built communities. I studied six years of architecture... wrote up reports on urban decay... defined modern arcology... got elected President... and now I get turned over for bedsores and my roommate is a man who sits on a toilet listen-ning to the pipes. I don't think about _why_. Give me the alarm clock."

I unplugged it from the wall, and I gave him the alarm clock. Reeve scrubbed one clumsy hand over the terrible dark bags of his eyes and pulled a screwdriver from _I don't know where,_ I swear from underneath the blankets, and started painstakingly unscrewing the back of the alarm clock. "Scrapes," he explained to me, which totally mystified me, but I let him do it because it probably made him happy and fulfilled a deep and animal need inside of him to look at alarm clocks in the nudey.

"Gawd, do you think I should check on him? Maybe I shouldn't. He might be naked in his _bathingsuit area._" (Reeve had his tongue stuck out the corner of his mouth and was patently not listening.) "I can't hear him. Can you hear him? Usually with my keen ninja senses I can hear the loud thump of a cat's footfall. Do you like cats? I used to have about nineteen. I used them for my secret Wutaian ninja cat's footfall hearing training - "

He was obviously tuning me out, so I leant my chair back and read one of Tifa's cooking books that she had stolen from the shelves here. I had thumbed through the well-worn pages about a million times, and obviously so had Tifa, because she had penned in new ingredients in most of the recipe and crossed out a picture of strawberry jam with her neat little flowing script: _does not work!_. I remembered how we had all sat around the campfire and ate cornbread that she'd cooked in a tin and mopped up the stew off our plates and I don't think I can ever remember being so happy. I was happy even if it was the end of the world: because we were all so fierce and convinced, even Cait who didn't care and Vincent who didn't smile, we had lost you and therefore we were immortal because nothing could hurt us any more. I said to Cid, _I miss her tonight,_ and he said _I miss her every fuckin' night_ and he gave me the onions off his plate.

"I miss her tonight," I said aloud.

Reeve surprised me by not even having to think about whether or not it was you. He gave me a quick, odd look: "You do," he said, a little questioning, and I shouldn't have been surprised. Only then he threw me by saying, "So do I," and putting three screws in his grimy mouth. I think it was also his way of saying, _I miss them,_ because really the Turks were most of what he had.

It was pretty much at that point that Barret came in to take over from my watchman shift; putting the plate of Corn Thins on the stony grey dresser, dark and warm and with a stupid bandanna wound around his head like he was a housebuilder. He cocked one eyebrow at Cloud's empty chair a little disbelievingly, staring at me like it was all _my_ fault. "_Still_ in the shitter?"

"The pipes are his mysterious mistress," I said.

"Scat," he said, swatting me kindly with his rolled-up magazine. "My turn. You go free now, Yuffie. Go - I dunno - play or sumthin'."

"Oh my Gawd, did you really just say that? What am I, _twelve?_"

I left, though, for Marlene and her colouring books: I never envied Barret those shifts. My dad used to say, _hell is what you make of it,_ and Shake used to say, _hell is other people,_ though Shake generally used to say this after he'd spend a little bit too much time with me now that I thought about it. When Cid had stood up from our hissing little campfire and looked all around at the Northern Crater he'd said, _fuck, is this place hell or what!_ in the cheeriest voice you could possibly imagine, putting his cigarette out on the nearest Tonberry. All I know is that some nights I still wake up and think I'm in that place, with the stone walls smelling of piss and sad accountants, and in fact we're in the dark and silent Traverse Town and there's Leon on one side of me and you on the other and all we had for dinner was Cid's reheated casserole and I've never been so relieved.

The thing is, Cloud refused to come out of that bathroom for three days, ear pressed to the wall as Tifa longsufferingly handed him endless cups of tea, and all any of us thought about it was that the toilet wasn't any uglier than the rest of this place and now that I think about _that_ we were so all ungodly stupid.

* * *

I'll remember that night, too, because it was the night Barret first kissed Tifa. _That_ was something so unbearably intimate it was like I'd ripped open his stomach and tongued his intestines, or, ew that is a gross simile now that I think about it, or _something_ - as humiliating and terrible and wonderful as watching somebody kiss somebody else ever could be, like kisses were something that the world had stopped thinking about, that didn't exist any more. I had stopped reading Biff and Shirilla, by the way, because I was heartsick and couldn't separate them any more from Reno and Rude and so I killed the Turks off all over again by never once more opening up the cover. Kisses were _stone cold dead_ and the thought that anyone could have them had kind of seeped out of my brain, like my belief in the Tooth Fairy. The lights were dimmed along the corridors and I was walking back to my room with the rubber floormats still making the cold seep up through my socks.

I'm going to use the word _eavesdrop_. Isn't that just so classy? It sounds like an accident, all _drop,_ like something you do by tripping over people through no fault of your own. I did not _snoop_. Snoop sounds totally retarded, by the way - and I stopped dead at the corner when I heard her crying, and it was happening too fast because if it had happened slower it would've freely been a _snoop_.

"C'mon, darlin'," - and she had her back to me as I lurked at the corner, torn between running to her and staying, and was I _ever_ that much of a kid? I could tell she had her fist in her mouth, trying to stop it all, and Barret was using the voice he only ever used on Marlene for skinned knees. I can tell you about dismembered hobos but them kissing is so _hard_. What's with that? "C'mon, baby-girl, Teef - "

" - don't know how you do it - "

"Baby, you've been doin' it so much more fuckin' longer than me, girl. I dunno what you're goddamn _runnin'_ on."

"Guilt," she said, and she burst into fresh sobs.

"Don't you say that shit, honey, you know it ain't true, you tell him a coupla bullshit little lies, ain't _spit_ in the course of - of _everythin'._"

"I hit him! I _hit_ him! And - and all he did, all he - he just let me pry open his mouth, check that I hadn't busted a tooth - "

"Hell, my opinion is that boy jes' isn't hit enough," he said, and I could see her wiping her face with her own shirtfront, pulling up the edge of her thin cotton t-shirt and dabbing at her as if she was so delicate she might break if he pushed too hard. "'Specially by you."

"He's like a dog, or - not even a dog, he's like a _rock_. Just the way he _looks_ and, and the way he looks at _you!_ You and he used to be so - " More floods. "He looks right through you and, and remember how you saved his ass at Gongaga, a-and - he grinned and - "

"I ain't ashamed to say it," Barret said, with finality. "I love that stupid motherfucker. Nearly 'bout as much as you do, considerin' - "

She was really crying now. She couldn't stop; you could tell by her breathing, her half-choked gasps of it. "I thought - I thought if I killed him it'd be better, if I drowned him in that stupid toilet, it'd be better for all of us - "

"Teef - "

" - I'm so sorry, I can't stop crying, I - I - I - Barret, I would've, if you hadn't come to Kalm. I thought about just putting the pillow over his face when he didn't move, a-and I had planned on..."

" - Tifa, goddamnit - "

"... I'd go and drink all the rat poison... isn't that a stupid way to die? For _me?_ It was like I was five steps back from - from when you and me started out, you and me and Jessie then Biggs and Wedge and - I can't live without him and I can't die without him. I'm - it's like he's stuck at my hip and it's like, it's like we're both dead some days... And all you ever do is shore me up, both of us, carrying me along. I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid, I'm so _sorry_..."

He kissed her then, good arm locked like a crossbar around her shoulders, sort of furious and panic-stricken and final. He pulled her into him and kissed her until she sort of went all limp, and then she un-limped herself, wet noodle to dry noodle - arms wrapping around his neck, pulling off the bandanna he was wearing on his short dark hair, and they _kissed_. She was ghost-white next to him, like skim milk, him all cinnamon-blacks and his fingers in her dark hair. And then they were suddenly kissing like they were angry at each other, like they were _furious_, and then suddenly gentle again, and she pulled her mouth away and set it at the hollow of his throat. Her fingers trailed over the badass fireball tattoo at his shoulder and she said something I couldn't hear: and Barret said, "Don't pay it no mind," and he kissed both her eyebrows.

They stared at each other: and then they started _laughing_, laughing far too hard, holding each other and rocking a little and hooting in what I saw as the most unromantic thing in the universe. She said, "You made my toes curl!" and then they just laughed harder until they were nearly doubled over and still holding hands, a beautiful picture of retards in love, or something. Then they looked at each other again and just the way they _did_ that - they were so hopeful, so hesitant, like they were planning some heist from a candy shop and didn't know if they could pull it off - and all I wanted was someone to look at _me_ like that, as if what I was consisted of all of their hope and light and relief.

I know they would've caught me, once they stopped staring goofily into each other's facial hair (and I guess Barret's beard was pretty rakish, now that I think about it) so I started to tiptoe the other way down the corridor - not to my room, because I would have had to run their gauntlet of mushy expressions, but down into the darkness the other way. I always seem to be getting myself into shit. I don't know how.

Because it meant that I was the first to hear it - the sound - the loud, splintering crash of porcelain, of wood tearing up, of the Buster Sword slashing over and over as Reeve yelled something indistinct and I tore down the corridor and nearly fell through the door. It was the bathroom: and Cloud moved through out of the little alcove himself all covered in little cuts from the little ceramic shrapnel. Something black and red and greasy fell off his sword and careened through the air to land on Reeve's bed; and Cloud brought the sword down again just as Reeve pulled his legs away, tearing thickly through the mattress, until it was dead. And it was a Heartless.

"_Strife!_" Reeve said, but Cloud was back in the bathroom again, tearing up what was left of everything - gushing water seeping into the carpet as he hacked the room to pieces, bringing down the baseboard and cutting into the concrete, just over and over and over like he couldn't stop. The thing on Reeve's shredded blankets expired with a greasy _pop!_, just like I'd seen back in Kalm, and Cloud dropped the sword and fell to his knees like he could pull up the pipes by himself with his bare hands and I threw myself onto his back and pounded on his shoulders.

"_Stop it!_ Stop it! Stop it!"

He flung himself back and tried to rub me into the wall like an annoyed donkey, both of us falling back and stumbling out into the bedroom again and knocking down Reeve's old IV - and it was the first time I'd seen a Heartless pull itself out of _nothing_, got the idea of how they moved around, when a Large Body suddenly appeared in the little space. The walls creaked with its huge arms and fat, oversized self, and it stood and blinked at us with large golden eyes as it stood in the streams of water and looked confused. It punched through one wall until the concrete crumbled away, so that it had room; then it punched the other wall, so that it had more room, and slowly squeezed itself out through the door. It; me; Cloud; Reeve; no Conformer and the Buster Sword somewhere at Cloud's feet. Reeve not capable of doing anything, unless it needed its watch fixed. One versus three.

I emptied out my pockets and flung everything at it that I could: three shuriken, which bounced off it with a curiously pleasing _blung!_ noise. One busted pen, which hit it in the eye and made it blink, and the butter-knife from an old meal of Cloud's which _blunged_ off its arm and made it mad. It had kind of a cute hat like the top of a teapot and a big old purple vest with ties that strained across its gargantuan belly, and it was loitering towards me with _intent_.

And the only thing I had in my shoe was a health-to-magic materia which now that I think about it is pretty much the most useless fucking materia _ever_, especially when you've got nothing to use it with, and _this is why I stole your materia in the first place._

Cloud had pulled up the fallen IV and was holding it by the base as the empty bag swayed temptingly in front of the Large Body; it followed the bag with its eyes. Then, totally out of nowhere, the Large Body swung its arms up back and forth and and pulled itself off the air and _jumped_ - the shockwave sent most of everything crashing off the walls and to the floor, including a feeble Reeve, me landing squarely on my ass and Cloud crashing face-forward. And then Reeve had a _fucking gun_ - where the hell had Reeve gotten a gun? - and the bullets sank partway into the big bubble of jelly-fat sitting squarely on the Large Body's middle, and then they _blunged_ out again, and this pissed it the hell off and it stumbled over to Reeve.

I pulled up all the old hypodermic needles out of the tin and grasped two by the base of the point, because Reeve was going to die. I mean, the Large Body could have just fallen on him and squashed his skull flat like I'd see it do to other things later, but for some reason it plucked up our Dear President by the leg and held him in midair like he was a rag doll. I ran, jumped, wrapped my legs around the small bobble head and drove the hollow needles into the flat back until they punctured and splintered and broke. The Large Body flung Reeve back as I swung one foot around and hammered in the needles with the sole of my shoe - Reeve and the bed both collapsed with a horrible sickening crack and the bed died, no saving the bed - and the needles must have just felt like bee stings but it was trying to pat its oversized arms back, knock me off, howled as I got one of the points clear down without it snapping off in the skin. And then there behind me was Cloud like an avenging angel - Buster Sword dripping water - and he leapt and sliced down coolly from shoulder to the base of the spine to cleave the thing open.

Something hot and fatty and red burst out from that terrible gash, covering Cloud and me in jellied guts as it sprayed upwards - the Large Body stumbled forward and I made a mad grasp for the light fixture to hold on tight as it rolled forward into the wall. Then there was that sickening _pop!_ again, and the red insides curled up like bacon on a hot pan and were black and disappeared with little curls of acrid steam. I was still hanging off the light. My hands were clenched shut and I was shaking, and I couldn't let go.

"God," said Reeve, quite quietly - and his leg was broken, it was at a horrible angle and the gun was still in his hand. I only realised then how little he'd trusted Cloud, with a pistol all hidden under his pillow. "God, it's all over."

"It came through the pipes," said Cloud. "The way is clear. He breached the lock."

"It's really all over," Reeve repeated in a daze, and he passed out with dignity and grace.

Cloud Strife looked at me - his blonde hair damped down with water and flattened in ridiculous places where usually it took up in ridiculous places, unruffled, and for a moment I didn't know him. I didn't know his face. It was some blue-eyed stranger who stood in front of me with his ratty-ass sweatpants and his mint-green Boys Are Lame! t-shirt and the Buster Sword resting easily on his shoulder.

"There's no more light to hide in," he said.

"I used to want to take off your pants," I said, and I started to shake all over, and I couldn't pry my fingers straight. Reeve was in the corner and he had a broken leg, and I was hanging off a wire in the ceiling and I couldn't get down. "I used to want to take off your pants and do things that were absolutely _rude_."

Once upon a time he would have grabbed my legs and helped me down and seen to Reeve, like he had eight legs and a job to do, but he just tapped his sword a little and stared past me into the darkness of the doorway. "She was gone a while ago... there's not enough God to go around."

"At this point, not even Aerith would screw you," I said, and his shoulder brushed my knee as he walked out - I couldn't hurt him, nothing could hurt him, he was gone and he didn't even care that the world was all crashing down. I could have broken his neck and he wouldn't have felt it - sandpapered his skin and he wouldn't have blinked.

We were so stupid. Nothing lasts forever, not even if you suffer for it.

* * *

Tifa put Reeve's leg in a splint and dosed him up so high that he kept calling me Marlene - found him some crutches as I got the backpacks, very quietly, as though it was early in the morning and nobody could hear. I stole into the kitchen and got all the food that would keep for us, just the canned stuff and some of the flour and things, and left a slightly gabbling message on Vincent's answerphone that he would probably never get. Before I left the comm room forever, I bent my head and for some stupid retarded lame-ass reason I kissed the communications microphone - the _microphone_ - for long, long seconds, long enough to last forever, until my mouth was red from the perforation. Goodbye, microphone, my only passionate love.

I strapped Conformer to my back and vowed never to take it off again, re-slotted the Materia and filled my pockets with it so that I clinked gently as I walked. We all waited in front of the main security room - Cloud standing there like a sentinel - until Barret took the key out of Reeve's wallet and he hesitated. He popped Marlene over on his other shoulder, who was quiet as a little mouse, and he put the key to the lock but stopped.

"I dunno - " he started, but then Cloud said, "Yes."

"What the hell will we do?" Tifa, her face a monkey-mask of careful blankness. "Where will we _go?_ What's our plan?"

"Twenty-seven," Reeve said indistinctly.

"Twenty-seven _whats?_"

"Don't worry him, Yuffie. I gave him stuff that could knock out a bear." Leaving Reeve behind had never been an option: and it was like we were leaving everyone else to die, with nary a note to the accountants. "He might just - "

"Twenty-seven," Reeve said again, with that slightly thick slur. "I can hear every word you say, Tifa Lockhart. No. 27."

Barret unlocked the first security door, leading to the corridor and the long, long staircases up: the first unsealing. We all dully trooped through into that dim darkness - up the flights that would go to the elevator, up the elevator to the first swingback seal door, through all of those and into daylight. They were all useless, because of the stupid _pipes_. "Hell's that," he said, but he didn't sound like himself.

"The new rocket. Junon's rocket. Cid's rocket. Space."

That pretty much stopped us all so short that we bumped into each other, crowding that little steel landing as Barret tossed the keys to the bunker back into the hallway and closed the door behind us. It locked itself. I never went back in there as long as I lived, and there was no ceremony about leaving - we just _left_. Left left left. We'd really left as soon as the Heartless had come up Cloud's stupid toilet, and at that point my heart was numb and vinegary with hate and hopelessness. I didn't care that we were leaving. I just - we left.

Tifa pulled Reeve's spindly body up the stairs, him a cacophony of crutches on the metal, and there was the deep sort of silence you get when everybody is thinking _really really hard_. "Are you saying that you had Cid, our Cid, working on another rocket?"

"Exploration," he said. "The new frontier. Old parts. Nearly finished. Flower of my administration..."

I hopped up the first three stairs to sandwich Reeve in-between Tifa and me, rattling like a pinball machine as I stared at him. He looked relaxed and even happy and was pretty much the only one, giving me a severe longing for lots and lots of drugs. "We have a _spaceship?_ Are you saying - do you mean we can _leave?_ Are you kidding? Where would we go, anyway? There's nowhere _to_ go."

"I ain't runnin' away," Barret said bleakly.

There was a long pause, and then Tifa said: "The Ancients colonised planets."

"Yeah, uh, Kisaragi Counterpoint. Hello! So did _Jenova._"

Reeve's voice was almost dreamy: "The Planet was dying before we were even born."

There were only the tiniest of pilot lights as we silently took the elevator up, as we opened into the huge gaping driveways with the rubber tracks of the buggy still burnt on them - where Reno had amused himself by fishtailing from doorway to doorway, where we had to open up the huge doors manually as they shuddered to life and groaned all the way down as we pushed on. Eight barriers. Marlene coughed and it sounded like a rifle crack in that huge dusty darkness, no Heartless but more than enough panic, our slow pilgrimage until we reached the last gate. We didn't open the huge boom doors: there was a sealed doorway that Tifa carefully lead Reeve's hand to, that Reeve entered code after code into until it said ACCEPTED! and Cloud pushed his way through. We all crept out as though expecting something to jump out at us in jubilant chomp-chomp Heartless expectation.

The first thing I knew was that it was dark, and I didn't realise that it was wrong until I remembered that it was about midday - it was _dark_. It was darker than black, shimmering at the corners of the sky into some eerie sort of orange band of nothingness - darker than dark, and everything was different. The trees were black, leafless structures with strange lights, the ground heaving up soap-bubble shimmers and all the grass gone. There was no moon. There were no stars. There was just that bleak blackness going on forever, over awkward surfaces and plains that we had never seen or known. The earth was cracked open in some parts, filled with pitch-black night like heavy tar, the soil all gone in place of hard-packed _something_. Barret put his big brown hand over Marlene's mouth so that nothing would break that hungry silence, not even her.

A hot wind scattered my hair into my face, so that I tucked it behind my ears and put my headband down to stop all the whippy strands from biting my cheeks. We all stared. Even Cloud did, though Cloud looked at it as though he'd always expected it and was swallowing it whole with his eyes to know it better.

Somewhere out there was even a rocket. Somewhere out there there was Vincent, 'cause I refused to believe otherwise, Vincent Valentine, cloak pulled over his thin mouth and pressed up into the shadows: red velvet on the black bare land. Somewhere out there was Red and Cid and my father. Somewhere out there were dead empty cities.

But I knew then that you weren't, like Cloud the Clod said - that you were gone, somehow, that you'd been there before but that you'd left us behind. I'm so sorry. I stopped loving you.


	6. vi: here is the evening

**A/N:** Next chapter ought to be out in July, as it's nearly finished too; feel free to shower with helpful abuse in order to get it done. I am clawing to get my life back on track, and that includes this, and I live in hope that some of you are still interested out there in space. I humbly ask apology; the world got in the way.

PS. Send cookies.

* * *

**But That Was In Another Country**

**  
****vi. here is the evening**

* * *

When I think about it now I guess nobody had a plan - not a real plan, not then; it wasn't like the Heartless were _lead_ by anything like Sephiroth and his Ye Olde Bande of Coughing Clones were lead by anyone, no corporation to smash like Shinra, nobody to _aim_ for. Back then it was simple. Kill Sephiroth, stop Meteor. It is pretty hard to get confused with those instructions, even if you are being lead by an amnesiac with a military obsession for sweatervests, it was what we _wanted_. There were other wants mixed up in there, like Wutai, like Aerith, like the Planet, but all roads lead back to Sephiroth and a big space rock.

We were all running crazy. Which is probably why, just like back then, we found ourselves with Cloud Strife heading up our column, leading us through the dry airless dark, carrying Reeve on a tarp stretcher, Barret coming up behind so he could strafe every time a pack of Heartless popped! in midair and came joyously galumping out and ricocheting off rocks in their eagerness to munch on us. Tifa strapped Marlene to her back so that she couldn't be grabbed every time our little straggling line was ambushed, and it was me dragging the makeshift stretcher and bumping the Dear Leader on every single rock from there to the Junon City, yearning for my lost and abandoned love so many miles from my position: my boobytrapped chest full of materia that I had left in the false bottom under my bed with my childhood diary and Mister Tootles, my stuffed elephant. Knight of the Round had been set jauntily in Mister Tootles' arms, as was appropriate.

In fact, all around, we only had a handful of materia that wasn't already junctioned in our weapons: rifling through everybody's pockets we only found two crappy Fires so shiny and new you could basically only light matches with them or make the Heartless a little warm, a decent Restore I had hidden in my underpants, the crappy health-to-magic materia that still irritated me just by existing, a mastered Ice, and -- drumroll -- in Reeve's pockets? A Chocobo Lure.

(Thanks, Reeve. Thank you for your Chocobo Lure. Thanks.)

Of course, he was so high by that point that he didn't give half a damn what we found in his pockets. Barret had set what he could of his leg, but it hadn't been a clean break. It had been a messy break. The splintered pile of his thigh had been strapped down and splinted and every so often Tifa would stop and give him an injection, sweating with having to do it so quickly and fumbling with the needle, strap pulled tight across the other arm and searching frantically for the vein. Generally there was no vein. Reeve's veins had filed for abuse and escaped. Eventually she had said "_Goddamnit_," and started fumbling with his pants and at that point I turned my virginal eyes away, because Tifa giving Reeve shots in the ass was not something I could ever unsee. What with his ass and our six whole materia (including the mighty awe of Chocobo Lure) and Marlene and our snail's pace through a landscape we didn't know any more, and being attacked every five minutes, we weren't making a hell of a lot of progress. Junon should've been four hours away, on foot. At the first twenty-four we weren't _anywhere_, getting nowhere fast, scrabbling like rats.

The first night we stopped. We had to stop. We were bleeding and exhausted and Marlene wept all the way, just continuously cried, and nobody could settle her or calm her down. It was actually Captain Crazy of the Nuts Brigade who figured out the only way we could rest - deep in the forest and kicking out at the tree roots, where the ground sharply sunk down into a depression in the earth, suddenly leaving the head of the column and approaching me and sticking his hands in my pockets.

"RAPE," I said. "NO CONSENT. Oh Gawd get him off of me I do not want to have his baby."

"You've got a baby fixation," said Tifa, with the ghost of a smile.

The sticking had turned to rummaging. "_Less talking, lady. More saving._"

"Here," said Cloud, and he pored over the materia -- came up with the cool yellow marble of the mastered Ice, scuffing his foot around the perimeter of the depression. He spat, as though for luck or as the ritual start of some mystical process, and then he literally _iced_ around the area - set up a frosted hanging curtain from tree to tree, in that space only about ten foot square, froze the magic overhead so that it was wall and ceiling and sealed with a thick rime of frost. Our breath started to mist in that space as, in a casual afterthought, he punched through the surface as an airhole so that we would not all die in a pile on each other.

"You're doing a fake Vincent," I said. My breath came in large, wet puffs, like ghosts. "You're getting rid of our body heat."

"Yeah, I heard of dat." Barret. "S'called _fuckin' hypothermia_, Strife. No use in hidin' when we're all damn dead."

"Risk death by ice," said his Royal Batshit, "or go face definite death by everything else."

"You rememberin' we gotta little girl here?" he snapped back hotly. "She can't survive this shit! You, me, we coulda done it, but Reeve's in a bad way and Yuffie ain't much bigger than our Marlene!"

"I am touched," I said. "Touched and offended."

It was Tifa who was silent; Tifa who, with nervous fingers, opened up the packs and started pulling out every single scrap of clothing we'd jammed in there, every single thing that was made of fabric. My teeth were starting to chatter at this point, and Barret took Marlene down from the cradle (where she looked _extremely_ pissed off) and just stuck her wholesale in his shirt like it was a pouch - then she just peeked her little dark head out from his neckline and looked even more pissed off, though warmer. It was nearly totally dark, the kind of dark where you can't see in front of your face, and Tiff threw down a couple of the snap-lights which gave off light but not heat and they just kind of sat there glowing neurotically and not doing a hell of a lot. I think she was just frantic with gladness that Cloud was actually doing something constructive for once, had had an idea that didn't involve standing in front of the bugs and letting them chomp us as we had resigned and fatalistic looks on our faces, which had been the entirety of his ideas before. We clumped together in the blankets with the snaplights and it was a huddle with me in the middle -- me and Marlene and Reeve, who slipped in and out of consciousness, and when he was conscious gave five minutes of animated mumbling before breaking into pain. Barret and Cloud bookended us and Barret and Tifa warmed themselves by having a rousing argument about where Tifa went in the grouping; and Cloud would've just sat outside and gone blue unless he was shoved in there bodily, blanket around his shoulders and his head, eyes half-closed with his eyelashes all frosted up.

All in all it was pretty freaking surreal. When we did it later and the novelty of being a Yuffiesicle was off I would lie there among the bodies and I would remember the snowfields near Icicle Town, the village in line for the Most Unoriginal Name, when we used to have to camp out in just all that blinding snow and go red from the reflection off the white, and make a fire at night with all the wood we were hauling around. (Know what? Icicle Town was horrible, and that was horrible, and I can't even remember why we were there other than the fact that Cloud had discovered he liked to pose sexily on a snowboard.)

"Six hours," said Tifa. In the snaplight dark her face was illuminated green, eyes squinting with the cold, smarting her skin. It was so cold it hurt to breathe, but outside the makeshift icehouse it was silent, no frantic greasy _pop!_s that heralded another snack attack. "We can have six hours."

That was how the first day went.

* * *

At the middle of the third day, Reeve ran out of drugs.

Normally I would have just called that no big deal, since an unconscious and slightly moany Reeve Tuesti did not usually excite or distract me, but it turned out that an unconscious and slightly moany Reeve Tuesti _without_ drugs was a screaming Reeve Tuesti who lapsed into shock and convulsions. It probably wasn't just the broken leg, even if at that point it might've been a birthday gift to amputate the thing for him, because his brain was still chocobo soup after being connected to a Cait Sith who died -- I mean, hell, I don't know _how that works_, nobody told me how it works, he never got a chance to tell me how it works. I guess he had been more careful when Cait Sith was about to get squashed getting the Black Materia. It wasn't like he didn't have seventeen million robot suits scattered around, because I guess he had wasted most of his twenties peppering them over the continent. Anyway. What was important was that Reeve was dying; was that we'd been ambushed like nineteen times; was that we were nowhere any closer to Junon, no smell of the sea, all around us a blackened and alien landscape that wasn't quite the outskirts of Junon City any more. It wasn't just the little black fleas getting at us any more: little behatted Heartless had started their adorably cute and terrifyingly nasty attacks. Barret called them the Reds, Yellows and Blues, because he had no imagination whatsoever.

"He's slowing us down," said Cloud Strife, who had been doing so well up until that point.

Tifa's teeth chattered; we were locked in another ice hut, mainly to try to figure out what to do with Reeve than for any hope of a nice nap, Marlene all buttoned up in her shirt instead due to the incomparable warming powers of her cleavage. Marls at that point was seriously going to grow up with a syndrome. "We're taking him with us," she said. "We are. Taking. Him. With. Us."

(Tifa Lockhart: Perfectly Gritted Teeth, just like Grandma.)

"I hope you don't mean that we're taking his dead body with us," sez me, "because I have seen this before, he'll stick his tongue out and froth for a while and then he'll start to breathe heavy, then his eyes will pop and he'll -- "

As though to kindly illustrate my point, Reeve started to hyperventilate. Both Barret and Tifa looked pretty wild around the eyes, as they were used to being mental health nurses, not real health nurses, and it was no good trying to shake Restore at our Dear President -- all it would do would be to fuse his unset, shattered bones with his meat, clot and screw around with the wounds already inside him, do nothing for the pain. If it just healed his leg and made him a cripple that would've been fine, but healing materia was indiscriminate. It would have simply killed him.

"Hold it," said Barret, and he stood up and shook off the blankets from our little huddle; he took his massive heavy gun-arm and belted at the ice-wall until it gave, breaking a hole for him to go through, stepping out before anyone could do anything. Held down by Marlene, Tifa couldn't do anything; she just hollered "_Barret!_" as Marlene shrilled _Papa, Papa_, and as counterpoint to this Cloud kindly and lovingly sealed over where Barret had just left.

Those were great days.

"Goddamn you, Barret Wallace," muttered Tifa in our huddle, with a pale face and red chapped cheeks from cold, "goddamn you."

"He'll come back," I said, "it's Barret, he always comes back, he's like, he's like a bad gil piece -- "

"Keep quiet," said Cloud, who was in our huddle, tightening it up like he'd closed over the hole that our gunner had left from. We'd only wasted one snap-light because it wasn't quite night, but his mako-blue eyes glowed in the half-dark, luminous and that strange green-blue like the depths of an iceberg. He wasn't quite a leader who struck fear down with his comforting presence. He was more like a leader who you knew looked at every single member of the group and noted down who would be best to eat if the push came to shove, and sometimes I wondered if we'd end up just eating Reeve, since Barret had like all this gross gristly muscle and I was way too skinny to devour despite my tender youth. "Conserve your heat."

The sixteen long minutes between Barret's leaving and Barret's coming back felt neverending; I spent the entire time with my eyes fixed at a point just above Cloud's nose as he sat, unblinking, unmoving, counting all the lines on his pale flaking lips, the smudges beneath his eyes. He was getting a little stubbly, fine transparent fuzz on his chin and his cheeks. He would probably just look crazier with a beard, like some guy out in a cabin in the hills waving his sword and swearing that the end times were near. Marlene dozed off, but when the ice hut shook as something heavy whacked at the side, she woke up from whatever unpleasant dreams she was having and shrieked.

It was just Barret (and the slow exhalation of Tifa's breath when she saw his arm emerge through the battered whole was a bit like a prayer), and he had brought back Presents.

"_Loco weed?_" she said, relief turning to bewilderment, "you brought back _loco weed?_"

"This is loco weed territory," said Barret, letting all of it tumble green and slightly sticky from his jacket, "and hell, it's better than goddamn nothin', ain't no pain relief unless you want us to bop him over his damn fool head."

"But it's _loco weed --_ "

"You want him crazy or you want him dead, woman?"

I was interested to see if, once he took it, he would do what chocobos did after they accidentally ate loco weed, which was spin around in lazy endless circles until they fell over -- but after they put some under his tongue all he did was stop convulsing, face greyish but his breath coming back to normal, lucid enough after ten or so minutes to take little sips of water from the bottles that we had. Reeve responded well to crazy drugs. Then again, he'd been taking them for years. I have my unscientific suspicions about what the hell his brain drug to control Cait Sith had been. Then again I could be totally wrong and it was probably, like, hyper-potions and sugar water, and he was just nuts and schizophrenic to begin with.

After that Reeve was _hilarious_.

"I have always thought that Elena was the perfect height for a woman," he slurred, being dragged along in the stretcher behind me as we went once more into the darkness, "not too tall, not too short. She had brown eyes. Having brown eyes is a good thing to have when you have blonde hair. It is unexpected. I mean, look at Scaaarlet. Scarlet had blue eyes and she was the biggest skank in the department. Elena had brown eyes and was sweet like the sweetest aaangel. Why did she like Tseng. Tseng... was... a... bore. My poor Elena. Poor poor Elena."

"This is the funniest thing I have ever seen," I said reverently in the first three hours, just to remind everybody of how, in fact, extremely funny it was. He pitched his voice into a low, baritone growl, a sort of thunderous monotone doom-and-gloom prophecy voice, and tended to draw out his vowels for no apparent reason than that it amused him. "I feel _so privileged_ to have, like, been present for this."

"I would have _tapped dat,_" said Reeve. "I would have _smote dat_ like an unmerciful WEAPON."

"Too much info, brutha," said Barret. "Too much info."

"There's still time for us to date, I am considering this." Though I still carried the head, Marlene's daddy had picked up the other end of the stretcher so that Marls could sit on Reeve's feet and ride along too; she had rebelled against being strapped to people's backs, being a grown-up woman too dignified for such things, and our plan of attack was that if ambushed we immediately surrounded the stretcher. "I am finding you more attractive than ever, even if you are like forty-nine and old and you have a big nose."

"Don't encourage him, Yuffie," said Tifa wearily, trudging in front of me. "He needs his rest."

"I'm encouraging him? I'm not encouraging him. I don't think he's hearing a word I say -- "

"I can hear eeeevery woooord that comes out your moooouth," pronounced Reeve with slow, ponderous difficulty, "and you are jaaaaailbait."

"I love you. I love you, I love you so _much._"

"Elena's dead now," he said, changing angle so quickly I pretty much got whiplash. "She died under my command. I take full responsibility at the inquest into her killing. My incompetency lead to the Turks' demise and the fall of my empire: I plead guilty."

(This was less hilarious.)

"Get some shut-eye, Captain President," I said, hauling him up behind me, my wrists aggravated after hours and hours of carrying him in an awkward position. My shoulders hurt. "You are kind of going into being a downer now."

"I have never seen two people who loved each other more than Reno and Rude," continued Reeve, in his sad Vincent Valentine monotone.

"Now this is getting suspicious and gross."

"Don't think I didn't think the exact same thoooooought, Yuffie Kisaragi. Or is that 'Kisaragi Yuffie'. I don't care. Who cares? Not me. I do not care. You are toooo yoooung to understand looove. Love that is naked, or otherwise -- "

"Oh my Gawd. Okay, now you can feel free to _shut up._"

He did, though possibly just because he was tired of talking more than he listened to my commands. We continued on in silence, which was peaceful if less interesting, or at least less terrifying than peering into the drug-addled portions of his brain. After a little while he presently said, "One one one, six two eight, five alpha one," and lapsed into silence again, which was kind of bizarre. I think I have never become alcoholic or into drugs simply because of Reeve and his loco weed and his injections, and the secret fear that I would be even worse if I stuffed them down my attractive ninja gullet. Whatever works. There's a lot of things I don't do because of Reeve; I don't look at the insides of clocks. Who wants to look at the insides of clocks? Clocks kind of creep my shit out, and it doesn't matter what the time is any more because Leon knows exactly what time it is (always _too late_, that's great Leon) and I'm pretty sure you calculate time by when we last had breakfast, and none of it works.

There's a lot I don't do because of Reeve.

At the end of the third day we heard the sea. We thought that the crashing of the black tide was pretty much salvation.

* * *

Junon City was a lost city. It was a crappy shell of a city back during the Sephiroth years, a military city with most of its manpower all gone as Shinra scrambled to do whatever it was doing back then, which to me all seemed like mainly pissing in the wind and not doing anything other than building really big guns. Like guns the size of a city. Not that I am not allowing that guns the size of a city have a kind of style you don't often get, but they'd taken away the Sister Ray long ago and dropped it on Midgar and made Junon look kind of naked and embarrassed. Anyway, it was crappy back then; and it was undeniably worse now.

We sat on the clifftops that sharply dropped down into the city -- the coastline was fogged up with thick, ashy mist, the enormous cradle that had used to hold the barrel lost somewhere out to sea. The salt-encrusted gunmetal grey of it, covered in comforting seagull shit, was black and dark now, lurching out of the cliff and then abruptly lost in the fog. The tower where it sat wasn't visible to us, either, out to the north and the dark where we sat on the peninnsula. Below us, Junon still burnt.

The smoke from the fire had been lost in the close neverending dark, but we could see it now; the reek had hit us a few hours before we made the climb up top of the hill, of wood burning, of steel and plastic, and as you looked down below every so often a muffled _boom_ in the red glare of crumbling buildings announced that something else had exploded. Junon had been built in tiers, in the huddled arms of the cannon frame, and some of the tiers had collapsed in themselves and choked up the serried ranks of skyscrapers with rubble. For a long while we huddled up there unmolested with Cloud on his belly looking down into the wreck with some binoculars, unmoved by every new dull _thud_ and _boomf_, and I sat next to Marlene as she ate an energy bar and with small-girl delicacy picked out every single raisin.

"Back in the ol' AVALANCHE days," her daddy said lowly, right next to me, "way back then, they were some mean motherfuckers; real mean, real war mean, befo' my time. I saw this clip once -- one of 'em ran into a Shinra branch building, just some bank or some shit, they didn't care jes' so long as it had the logo -- packed to the fuckin' gills with, with explosives an' shit, shrapnel. Didn't make it too far 'fore he pulled his trigger and the buildin' came down, whole street came down, shit! We jes' used to set bombs, blow up the stations, they wanted to blow up the whole damn world. Y'see the cameras on that street in the clip -- nobody left, like there was nobody left on the Planet, hell! God damn _mess_."

"Worse than this?" I said.

Barret fixed the smoking city down below with a long, level look, hefted his gun-arm to a more comfy position in a flurry of tiny clinks. Eventually he said, "Those little piss-streak bombers di'n't know shit."

(Marlene finished picking out the unwanted raisins and, with a flick of her skirt, dumped them all over the side. They tumbled down into the rocks below like pebbles, too light to make a sound.)

"East side's taken," said Cloud, never looking away from the binoculars. The heat reached us up here, drying us out until we were sweating bullets, rubbing smuts out of our faces as we watched the gulf. "Airship moorings gone, elevator's gone. The city was shut-in to the Heartless, high walls and shadows... would've been easy pickings. The mako'll keep it burning for months."

"Thus goes the cradle of my government," said Reeve dreamily, still on the stretcher, arm-deep in one of the old PHSes that didn't work any more. I'm pretty sure his fingers were stuck in there. Every so often a little spark would rise up from the machinery and die on his jacket-arm with a sad little _fss_ of momentary electricity. It kept him happy and busy and not giving us a running monologue of his life story. He was _profoundly_ stoned. "Thus goes. O unhappy city, your king died long before."

Tifa eased the binoculars away from Sniper Strife's unwilling fingers, laying down beside him and watching the city burn away. Her mouth was no longer the taut line that it had started out as; just resigned, just cold and calm like she was doing some sort of mantra on the inside. Another _boomf_; from far away there was a terrible metal creak of protest from the gun, a sort of steel groan. I could see her thoughts without her having to voice them. _Should have gone south,_ her white knuckles said. _Should have gone to Fort Condor._

"No airships left," she said, more to herself than as a question. "No airships left at all. What about the hydroplanes, or -- "

"All in the hangar did burn," said Reeve tranquilly, "caught on camera, confirmed by my three right hands. All in the hangar is gone."

"We'll never leave by air." (Cloud and Reeve were a little like a duet at that point, though at least Reeve had the excuse that he had neat loco weed in his bloodstream and had started to smoke it wrapped in rice-papers that Barret had found in the supplies, fingers shaking a little as he touched the cylinder to his lips. Cloud's excuse, as ever, was that he was a dick.) "We will never cross the ocean."

"I need to get into the city."

Surprisingly, neither Barret nor Tifa struck this down. They stared into the smoky night and the gunman just fiddled with the compartment on his forearm and reloaded, pulling Marlene back from the edge like a mother hen nudging his chick away from the precipice, as she munched thoughtfully on the rest of her energy bar and made faces at the taste.

"I refuse to believe that there's something down there we can't use," said Tifa.

"Amen," said Barret. "Not with Shinra bein' the paranoid sonsabitches they were, hell! No, we're goin' down, girl, there'll be somethin'. There's always somethin'." His hand strayed across to her shoulder, briefly; just a touch, fumbling a little with her cheek, her hair, so quick that it could have been a flaily accident of hand-placement. He repeated: "There'll be somethin'."

"I pray to a multitude of heathen gods that there will be toilet paper," I said, and that was that, there was no more compelling reason to go.

* * *

We were attacked on the way down three and a half times (the last Heartless swarm consisted of two slightly confused-looking Reds, shot down into greasy _pops!_ by Barret's dangerously itchy trigger finger before they could even think about Fire). The city, though, was dead. We hiked around the cliffs down the steep hill that lead to the beaches, the ashy mist plastering our faces with little grey and black bits, stifling and hot. In the end -- after a serious bitchfight between Cloud and Tifa and Barret -- we rappelled down to the upper tier, even Marlene tied to me because I was a freakin' ninja, Reeve harnessed to Cloud because we didn't like him or something. Junon was a death trap; but the foundations outside had been built solid, built to last mako meltdowns and assaults and whatever the Planet could throw at it. Nonetheless, we didn't even try to go on the west side, which was a smouldering shit-heap, and we entered Junon City through an emergency door up top for the guys who had used to fix the air conditioning in the office building.

The west side was the furthest away from the mako plant, which had been down near the shoreline, and the building we were in was dark and dank and smelled like spoiled things but was not melting underneath us. It had been an office building. All the glass in the top floors had exploded in the windows in a million tiny pieces of clear shrapnel, and the air was thick with smoke. The walls looked warped and peculiar, probably because the water sprinkler system had gone off some time before and had dried out. There was still an inch of water in different parts of the building, little surprise fun-lakes, where the pipes had burst.

As we went down the stairs, clawmarks scored deep holes all the way down for two full floors. It was not a place I would have wanted to throw a pizza party.

But there were no Heartless. The city was empty and devoid of them, even if they had been flinging themselves at us enthusiastically in their invisible patrol groups all down the hill. The mako and the fire. Or maybe the fact that _the city had a humungous empty gun-cradle about to precariously topple down and squash us all flat_, and that only the stupid and the desperate travelled into it. We were desperate. We were also stupid. We were also tired, too, bone-deep tired, and I was a little contact high from Reeve's ceaseless chocobo blunts. I got all excited over the fact that the thirty-third floor yielded a broken-down candy machine and a drinks machine, and as we all piled into a dingy office lounge I spent my time with my arm up the bottom trying to pick the mechanism from inside. Reeve spent his time with the insides of the wall-phone, laid on the couch like a beautiful maiden and getting his fingers stuck inside that instead.

Junon had been a military city. Cloud and Barret sat down with the first-aid kits that had been left on each floor and raided them for the good stuff; some handguns, some bullets, some shitty low-grade Restore materia that nobody had ever used, and mysteriously the world's largest supply of fanny packs. There was no electricity generator, but the water ran (it just didn't run _hot_). As they happily sorted through pill packs by romantic candlelight we all went to the women's bathrooms, setting up the torches so that we were showering by flashlight. We washed with hand soap all over our bodies in the dark and the water was as cold as the soap was skin-strippingly acid, but some of our natural grease came off and we immediately lost five pounds. Marlene and I stood there, naked and wet and suspicious with only little hand towels to dry us, as Tifa came wearily towards the mirror with a pair of scissors she'd ostensibly stolen from the kit. It was the first time that I had ever seen her naked. It was awe-inspiring, like seeing a mountain up close. (Two mountains.) I felt weirdly unshy, when back in the days I had always changed with you and Tifa in the room under six sheets and in five seconds flat when you two had cavalierly wandered around topless and punched each other and pulled each other's hair in a friendly and, now that I think about it, _really lesbian_ way.

"I don't want to join this club."

"_What_ club, Yuffie?"

"You are naked and coming towards me with implements; I am hella flattered but I decline, I -- _holy Da Chao you bounce a lot._"

Marlene giggled wildly at this. Tifa made a face at me and stuck out her tongue, which Marlene giggled further at; and in the gloom, illuminated only by the piss-thin little beam of the flashlights, she looked at herself in the mirror and she sighed. I remember how tired she looked, how worn, lips so pale that they looked nude in her face. "I'm doing this for all of us," she warned, "brace yourselves. We can't go on like we've been going on."

I let out that silly sound everyone makes when they see another person get hurt -- that kind of hissing through your teeth -- as Tifa scrunched up her hair in one fist and, with the scissors in hand, sawed artlessly through her heavy mass of dark hair and dropped it in the sink abruptly like it was a rat. She chopped at it, the long bits away from her face, and Marlene watched with big eyes as Tifa sat down on one of the nasty plastic office chairs and shivered a little as I finished the rest. We cut it _short;_ her own eyes were dark and luminous and huge as I left her hair cropped like a boy's, that strange chocolate-brown colour that in some lights came out nearly red. Without saying a word she left it to me to gently comb back Marlene's snarls and do the same for her, short dark duck fluff that curled into cowlicks at the back, and the little girl stared in the mirror in numb awe as I ducked down and let Tifa cut off my ends. My hair had been lingering in lank hunks around my shoulderblades. She cut it shorter than I'd ever liked it before, because my hair had a horrible tendency to stand on end when it was short, and also because in my opinion I looked like someone's younger brother hoping desperately for puberty to kick in.

"I'm a boy," said Marlene to the mirror, oddly calm.

"No you're not," soothed Tifa, "no, you are the prettiest girl I have ever seen in my life, and you take that back."

She shook her head mutely. "I am a boy," said Marlene. "My boy name is Dinosaur. I am now Dinosaur."

_Dinosaur_ looked at us placidly as we packed up laughing.

"Well, there are worse names." There was one last grimace as shorthaired Tifa (who somehow managed to look chic and fragile with her new hairstyle, whereas I looked neither chic nor fragile) prodded at the pile of brunette hair we'd left in the sink, which looked like some kind of creeping bathroom monster. Hair also scattered around the sinks, the floor, sticking to us in unlikely and unseemly places. But there would be no more greasy tails down my collar, no more combs getting stuck in Marlene's hair, no more Tifa's ponytail getting everywhere when she did not want it to get everywhere. "Are you _sure_ you don't want to change your mind, Mister 'Dinosaur' Wallace?"

"No, 'cause I already picked it, and no take-backsies."

The Wallace family was a harsh one for take-backsies, obviously. "Well, _my_ boy name is," I said, "is. Is Gordo. _I_ am now Gordo."

"_Gordo?_"

"Everything is a let-down after 'Dinosaur.' And it's like my dad but with an extra consonant. The R stands for _rockin'_. What's your boy-name? Reveal your secrets."

Tifa looked in the mirror, down at her bountiful chest, and then in the mirror again as she dried Mar -- _Dinosaur_'s damp little head. "'Unconvincing'," she said.

She had that right.

We were still picking bits of hair as we dressed in gritty clothes and went back to the lounge, taking the flashlights with us, where Marlene waited patiently by her father's shoulder as he packed bullets into a bandolier. Eventually she had to joggle his shoulder and say, "_Yo_," as he looked up and swore a couple of times. Then he looked up at Tifa and swore another couple of times, and seemed to be satisfied that appropriate male action had been taken. "Marlene," he just said, perplexed. "_Mar-lene._" ("Papa, my name is _Dinosaur._")

As this new boring Wallace family argument raged on I had about five seconds' worth of hope for Cloud as he looked up at me and Marlene and Tifa, fell on Tifa and raised his eyebrows just once: but then he ruined it all by merely saying, "Good," and going back to restuffing our medical satchel. Reeve said nothing at all; he was busy taking the batteries out of the phone and doing what looked like illegal things to them. I'd already tried my cellphone; it wouldn't get any reception, and nor would anyone else's. I snuck out and took Barret's PHS with me hallway even though we'd all sworn blind not to separate, and I held it in the crook of my arm as I silently stole every last roll of toilet paper from each cubicle.

_rrrng rrrng rrrng_

Vincent never picked up. More importantly neither did Junon Pizza, and Junon Pizza no longer answered its phone at all but just gave me the series of beeps that heralded no connectivity, so my reign of terror and free food had obviously ended. I kept sweeping my hand through my hair to feel the texture -- it was somehow a little prickly now, a bit fuzzy -- and I wrapped my headband around my forehead anyway and I sat in the dark and talked to the silence on the phone. There wasn't even an answering machine or I would have filled it up long ago; I just talked, rambled, caught crazy-ass Clouditis. Soon I would be talking to Vincent out loud in front of everyone else and using lots... of... crazy... pauses, and stroking Reeve's stubble intently as I looked him deeply in the eyes for six hours without blinking. Not that our righteous leader had done that yet, but maybe he would, and I could watch.

"I know this is weird, me still talking to you," I said in the dark. "I know you're not gonna connect and your cellphone probably isn't even on at all or you dropped it in the sea, I don't know _what_ you meant by 'going dark'. I am not hip to your crazy spy lingo, Vinnie. I just wanted to let you know that, that we're out, and I feel really stupid talking to this phone but I also wanted you to know that it kind of makes me feel better. That is the point, making me feel better. I keep on -- I keep on thinking about our last chess game, and I know that in answer number seven I was like 'rook to C15' but I have changed my mind. Anyway, I wanted you to know that my new name is 'Gordo' because 'Dinosaur', um, that was taken, and, uh. I hope you made it to Cosmo Canyon okay because I keep on thinking about you not making it to Cosmo Canyon okay and it ruins my ability to make witty quips and smiles and _Gawd_ I am talking to you like you are my imaginary fucking friend. This is stupid. I feel stupid doing this. I feel _more_ stupid doing this with _you_."

I hung up with a rattle.

When I brought it back to the living room with my arms also coincidentally piled full of toilet paper (which was disappointingly sandpapery and not at all soft, not like the nice stuff President Shinra had filled his secret bunker with) Reeve's paw shot out and he yanked the PHS away from me slyly without asking first.

"Don't you do that shit," said Barret angrily as he propped himself up, loco weed cigarette hanging out his mouth as he started deftly prying up the back with his everpresent screwdriver. "We only got so many of 'em, Tuesti!"

"You have to let me have it because I am dying slowly but surely, inch by inch," said Reeve, jabbing in our general direction with the cig, "so shut up and stop being such a bitchy bitch bitch about it, AVALANCHE. _God_, why didn't I get stoned more during high school? I was a scholarship student and I received twenty swirlies a term, fifteen percent more swirlies than other kids. I am _so_ not afraid of the police right now. -- Fuck it, I should have just gotten high all the time instead of studying and rewiring the school security cameras and never getting laid. This PHS is weregild for my lost youth. Anyway, I'm the goddamn President. Did that never mean anything to _anyone_. Who cares if I never got legally elected by my proper constituency..."

(Barret let him have the PHS if he promised to shut up.)

We decided by vote that we could get five hours' worth of sleep: the lull of being in a building again, with walls and ceilings and floors and no light, was too familiar and comforting to all us molemen. I kept forgetting that just three days ago we'd still been deep below the earth in the Shinra bunker eating bad ham, because time moved differently, sort of a quick-quick-slow. Cloud repeated in an endless monotone "If we stay here, we will die," but seemed a little swayed by Tifa's curt argument to take sleep where we could "fucking get it." (We had all stopped trying not to swear in front of Marleneosaur, even Tifa, because the little girl had taken it upon herself to be our moral compass and give us a pinched, disapproving look every time we said a rude word and sorrowfully gazed at her father every time _shit!_ left his mouth. It probably gave her something to do, anyway.) They stripped the cushions from all of the chairs and sagging smoke-smelling sofas and made a bed in the printer room, because Marls had started coughing fretfully from all of the stuff in the air, and Cloud refused to go in but lay out flat outside the door in what was probably a slightly sweet show of bodyguarding. Or being nuts: he laid the Buster Sword out flat by his right side, between him and the door, hand on the hilt as he closed his eyes and lay like he was dead. I didn't know any more.

I couldn't sleep. I sat in one of the stripped chairs close to Reeve and ate a pile of candy, feeling empty, washed out, like I'd been plunged clean of my insides and filled up with some kind of packing foam. He didn't sleep either. I watched his grazed fingers skim over the insides of the PHS, pry things up with the screwdriver and rewire them again somewhere else (and then pick them up again endlessly and wire them somewhere else, just to prove that he wasn't doing anything useful) and chipping it against little boards on the insides. The loco weed let off a too-sweet, slightly oily smell as it burned.

I remember his stubble, and the cuts on his cheeks; his bleeding fingernails, the uncomfortable arch of his leg propped up on the couch arm. He worked with a flashlight wedged in the cushions above and candles on the floor, flickering and pooling wax on the bit of grille Tifa had stuck them in, fat ivory sticks. I sucked on chocolate-covered mints until the chocolate melted away and left chewy mint bits on my tongue, which I carelessly stuck up in my teeth.

"Are you really dying, Reeve?"

"Dying is just a transitionary process," he said, his fingers never stopping their flight, wire to wire. "You could say we're all going through it at the moment."

"Are you scared?"

"Loco weed, scientifically known as _k-tethylamine_, inhibits the portion of the brain that normally stimulates fear and adrenaline reactions." A few more wires were teased out with infinite gentleness. "_I_ fear nothing, pain nor death. Sucks to be you, Kisaragi!"

"I'm scared and pathetic. Give me a hit."

He exhaled patiently. "Only Kisaragi would try to bum my drugs," he said. "_No._ I have built up a tolerance due to taking it six times a day. _You_ would be an agitated mess trying to have sex with the table lamp -- "

" -- _grossness_ -- "

" -- and basically you'd look less cool than me."

I recognised the lyric swing of his voice, the lighter tenor, that he kept slipping in and out of. Sometimes it was Reeve's dry tones; and then there was the other. "That's mondo difficult, Cait."

"Back atcha."

We sat there in the dark as I tried to pick chewy mint bits out of my teeth, sucking hopelessly as he fiddled with his wires. "Do you know," I said after a while, "I have never been drunk. I have never gotten high. I have stolen a lot of stuff, but it was for patriotic reasons, so it doesn't count. I have never been to jail for exposing myself in public. I have never had -- I have never had sex, what's _with_ that. Don't tell anyone but seriously, what's up with that."

"Your personality," said Reeve, and he flipped the contraption in his arms over and began working on the other side. "I don't know. Why you're asking me, I cannot say. -- Say, is this a hamhanded request for me to take your virginity? Don't know about you, but I'm seriously not up to it, Yuffster. Not even if I wanted to, which I'll confide in you that I don't. You look like a boy hooker at the moment. Reno, _he_ carried off 'boy hooker' with style. You just kind of suck."

"This is the worst conversation I have been in," I said, in some awe. "This is the worst conversation, maybe ever, that anyone could ever be in."

"Take my advice." Back to the Shinra department head then, who tossed the stub of his hand-rolled cigarette into the grille, where it tipped sad little ashes to the floor. Both hands free now, he twiddled at the mesh-board of the PHS intently. "Life is short. Life is cheap. Embarrassment beats out regret. We're in transition, Kisaragi; if you have unfinished business in this life I suggest you do it now. Just not to me," he added reflectively, "because I am nearly forty, and therefore more than old enough to be your father, and would go to the bad hell."

"I hope you die a thousand times; maybe a million."

"Life's a bitch, Yuffie, etcetera, etcetera."

I rustled the bag in my lap. "Do you want some peppermint candy? You probably have some major munchies. This is good stuff. It sticks in your teeth and you can't get it out. It's stuck in there maybe forever. When I close my teeth my jaw kind of sticks in a minty-fresh trap of despair way, it's pretty awesome."

"No, but I'm charmed you offered."

"What _did_ you want to do, Reeve?"

For the first time, he stopped working on his mish-mash monster of wires and electronics, the gutted PHS and the gutted clock and whatever else he had amassed, rested his head back on the cushion and sighed. It wasn't a _you are so annoying you are harshing my buzz_ sigh; it was the sigh of someone who had had a very long day, and was a little defeated, the sigh of someone who just wanted to go up to bed and go to sleep and wait for the weekend. "I wanted to rebuild."

(I think that out of all of us, none of us had any really heroic goals; maybe Tifa and Barret had a while back, with AVALANCHE, wanting in their hot and fiery activist hearts to make a difference in their slum. But then things got muddled up for them and they fought now because they'd always fought, they never sat back and let things happen to them. Cloud fought for himself, because _himself_ had been a person he'd never really known anyway, and Vincent fought because he wanted to be forgiven. Cid had fought as a middle-finger to everyone, everywhere, to the stars and the sky, and Red had fought to prove -- prove something, anything. I'd fought for Wutai, and also because I was badass.

Reeve Tuesti had fought for a dream and for the people, for the future. Out of all of us, his prize was older, more fragile, more ephemeral, and gave him nothing except the chance to roll his sleeves up and get to work. And in his own way he'd been fighting much longer than any of us. You have to be a pretty good person to fight for so long and so hard for other people who just hate on you all the time. Better than you, even: you gave your life in the form of you dying, and I know now that that dying is _easy_. He gave his life in the form of twenty years of hardcore bureaucracy and written reports.

Also he gave his Chocobo Lure. _I_ still think that's pretty hilarious.)

* * *

I woke up from an uncomfortable sleep (naked head syndrome; my neck didn't have anything to warm it) a couple hours later to Reeve's contraption making a whole heap of musical beeping noises. Since I had been pretty convinced that the thing he'd been working on was just something to keep his crazy drugged-up hands occupied so he didn't pull his hair out, I was impressed just that it made crazy beeping noises. I should've had way more faith in his ability to make a computer out of, like, two wires and a lemon. I was still half asleep when Cloud got up from his bed on the carpet and came to deal with the beeps: he kept his sword at the ready as he stood in front of Reeve, the candles all burnt down but one, just a gleaming stick and mako eyes in the darkness.

"... still ready for transmission," Prince Electronics said, in and out of my consciousness, "making their way west for three hours... only four responded, weren't more than six on this continent anyway."

"... what's it..."

"... transmitting, Strife, ... keep your pants on..."

More beeping. At this point I roused myself fully from my beauty rest; Reeve looked like shit on a stick, eyes bloodshot, hands shaking a little as he laid back on the couch and kept his thumb on his machine. He kept on flicking down a little dial that was making rhythmical beeping noises, a pattern of them, his finger on another switch as he stopped and waited for a new succession of interesting beeps. He looked exhausted. He seriously looked nearly dead. Dead but somehow triumphant: he coughed in the darkness, a deep wet racking noise. As more beeping came, he looked exhilarated.

"No way but water," he said.

"Five people can't man that."

"Four robots is a start. Why do you have to be such a whiner."

Cloud did not respond to that. He just said: "It's still in dock?"

"Don't know if it's got juice, buddy, but we can only pull miracles out of my ass every couple hours. This ass is not a magical insta-miracle dispenser."

It was always horrifying watching Cloud going from _creepo-style still_ to _all in action_, and he did that then. His mako eyes half-closed as he marched over to the flashlights, the packs, pulled up his own and threw me mine straight in the face before making a beeline for the other door. Reeve-Cait just relaxed back, sunken, a little relieved, thumb still intermittently doing the beep orchestra as I fumbled to stand and pull on my socks. I was shoving myself into my boots as well when I heard Barret's holler of "_Submarine?_" and I mentally prepped myself for hours and hours of underwater vomiting. It was joyous.

"You are the _best_ schizophrenic cat-man-robot that we have _ever_ had," I said, hopping over to Reeve with only one boot on, and I bent down to kiss him full and noisily on the mouth. (He made strangled noises and his eyes flew open and afterwards said weakly 'Oh God, Kisaragi, _bad hell_,' but I always translated his sad misery as him having a seriously erotic experience. Also all the loco weed he'd done kind of made my lips numb afterwards for half an hour which maybe translated as my first daring to do drugs, so that was an experience perk for my sweet, sweet lovin'.)

Going down in the darkness was kind of an escape. My heart hammered in my chest and I held our Marleneosaur on my back as we went down stairwell after stairwell. The lower we got the warmer it got, and the blazing daylight fire when we got down to street level was also kind of like a celebration; rubble everywhere, Gawd, rubble and the not-far-off crackle and groan of the fire, the sharp smell of mako when it was burning and the heat. I did not give half a clinical shit. It felt like the first reprieve we'd been granted since, since it all _started_, beautiful wonderful Reeve and his beautiful wonderful submarine, and not one Heartless in sight. The city was dead: there was nothing they cared about. We had a free run picking over the crumbling and caved-in streetways down to the dock area, the tunnels down, and boaty underwater _freedom_.

We'd tied Reeve to a chair and just dragged him along that way, hefted by Barret and Cloud between, running without being chased as fast as we can to the seafront. As we made our way down the tiers the slow-smoking fire got worse; I put my mouth to my sleeve as my eyes watered, as Marls buried her face in my hair, as we wheezed our way to triumph. It was so ridiculously _easy_. There was a momentary hiccup as we reached the seafront entrance and tried the keypunch lock over and over and over again, but then Tifa -- drunk on hope and four days of not a lot of sleep -- got a slightly crazed expression in her eyes and kicked the doors in until they were crumpled metal. It was probably the haircut.

The big tunnels down there had always been for the transport vehicles to drive through, to each dock, wide and still with the pilot lights running down each side glowing like little lamps. We were met with the first Cait Sith at the fork of the first tunnel, bouncing out on his Mog: a portion of the Mog had been burnt off and showed the metal frame underneath, pockmarked with scars, which made him look more than a little nightmarish. The Cait sitting on top was singed. The little crown that usually sat on his head was kind of melty.

"Voice recognition: Reeve Tuesti," said our President from his office-chair throne, voice raspy from the smoke. "Password: beta six three, nine nine four."

"Gotcha, Boss," said the Cait Sith, and lead the pack as we filed after him.

"How many of those do you _have_, Reeve?"

"At this point I can give you an answer which might worry you, Miss Lockhart," he said, with eyes shut, "or I can lie."

The flood-gates for the tunnels were locked, but Cait Sith's gloved fingers ran over them with unnatural swiftness and the mechanism groaned as the doors opened for us. It was like going out the Shinra bunker again, same model, same doors: but this time it was a little less of the _crushing despair_ and a little more of the _budding hope_. The other three Cait Siths met us waiting in front of the submarine, attentive and whole, and I felt more affection for the sub than I ever had. My heart swelled with fondness and pre-ride nausea watching it sit there in its little lock.

The Cait Siths conferred amongst themselves before opening it up and letting us pile in; it smelled like dusty old air and neglect and I chose to translate this as smelling like Destiny. Barret settled Reeve in the center, where he leant back in his chair in obvious exhaustion, the Caits all working around him in creepy fourfold concert as the sub came to life. Cloud closed the door behind us all with a slightly foreboding _clang_ to shut us all in. As he tightened the lock and activated the seal, three of the Cait Siths moved themselves back to distribute themselves in various parts of the submarine that I did not care about, my main interest being an old trashcan that would be my Friend for the rest of the journey.

"What's our fuel?"

"We have three options," said the first Cait Sith. "They are: Costa del Sol, Costa del Sol, and also Costa del Sol. Pick one. Pick any one."

"Costa del Sol."

"A wise choice!"

Tifa was gently undoing the straps that tied Reeve to the chair, mindful of his splinted leg, and I put Marlene down to settle herself in a chair as Tiff transferred Reeve to one of the slightly comfier squashy station chairs at the front. He smiled at her, nearly drunk with sleep: he beckoned her down and whispered something in her ear before nodding off nearly immediately. He had done his duty.

She had a slightly bizarre look on her face, running one hand through her short fine hair and then running it through again for luck, so I had to ask. "What'd he say?"

The look was turned to me, quizzical, and she shrugged her shoulders. "He told me he was 'adamantly not a pedophile.'"

"He's good people."

"Why are you hugging the trashcan?"

"Why do you _think_ I'm hugging the trashcan?"

"Guess we're headin' to Costa del Sol," said Barret, and with a great sigh he too dropped his pack and settled down in one of the station chairs at the extremely cramped front, leaning on the back of it to look at Cloud. "Let 'er rip, man, c'mon."

Adding to the bizarre and crazy euphoria of the day, the blonde had put his sword down next to the pilot's chair and pulled himself into it and he was looking at Barret with a funny expression. I realised that this was a funny expression because he was actually looking at him _with an expression_. It was not much of an expression; it was more just a kind of flicker around the mouth.

"Golden shiny wire?" he said.

Barret looked at him as though he had just said _toast rockstar buttercup_, which would have made exactly as much sense as what Cloud had just said did, and with a little more emphasis in his monotone Cloud repeated "Golden shiny _wire_," as though talking to a very stupid child. All I knew is that the big dark man stared at him and stared at him and then busted out laughing, low husky velvet laughter like I hadn't heard since back in Kalm, and that Tifa fussing with Marls in her chair had stopped and was looking up as though her heart had stopped.

"Yeah, yeah, Spike," he said, "yeah, this is kinda like that." Then he said: "Asshole."

(I never got that.)

* * *

When we got into the ocean everything was dead.

Twenty minutes in, all still and silent in the water, was when it happened: was when the radar started going crazy, _blip blip blip blipblipblipbliblibli_ in a mad cacophony. The submarine lurched as Cloud drove us hard to port, as I threw up for added emphasis in my trashcan, as the lights went down and a klaxon started to wail. It was Tifa who pulled herself steady and stumbled over to the portholes to look, and gave a cry of such wordless horror that it stopped me mid-puke and I went over to see too.

It was not a sea serpent: it was a many-tentacled _thing_, larger than the Highwind, a crazy jester-striped mess of black and purple and there in the center of the tentacle mass was the symbol we'd seen on some of the others, the bizarre broken heart-sign, waiting for us amiably as it reached out another tentacle out towards the sub. My knees locked, mouth still hot and sticky with bile, as that tentacle came so slowly towards us, as I gripped one of the railings as we swung again and rocked wildly as it glanced against the far side.

We would have died there, genuinely died there, and that was when Cloud took his hands away from the controls: picked up his sword, bizarrely, ready to die there too, because when all that water came rushing in we would be crushed and drowned by the pressure. We'd never used that precious Underwater Materia: it was still sitting with Mister fucking Tootles who I was seriously beginning to resent. I had figured it would have been a good trick for parties or something, I'd never thought it would be _useful_ -- ready for death, Cloud anyway, standing up at the help and braced to not go down with the ship. But far to the left something came in a frenzy of bubbles -- launched itself into the monstrous Heartless wholesale, a huge unnatural contraption of green, easily three times the size of the sub if hilariously miniature compared to the monster.

"You're late," said the ex-SOLDIER, faraway, "and the Planet doesn't care any more."

Tail raised, glowing scarlet at the center like a vengeful heart, Emerald WEAPON attacked. The water boiled around it as it fired glowing gold beam after glowing gold beam at the beast, which pulled away momentarily as though stung, tentacles all curling in on itself as though ready to propel away. The lost guardian jerkily raised its arms, all blue and yellow lights, and fired a volley at the monster that turned one of the tentacles into a goopy black mist of blood and guts. Tifa at this point was screaming "_Go,_ Cloud, just _go_," and he wouldn't, and hand to my mouth I lurched over at the same time Barret was trying to pick up a sobbing Marlene who'd been flung from her chair and was bleeding from her temple. I spun the wheel away again and we shot forward.

As I looked back the WEAPON had been caught within the mesh of the tentacles, thrashing like a caught chocobo as it fired over and over and over again, endless, with the monster beginning the slow process of categorically pulling it apart. It started with one arm, which came off with an explosion that rocked the submarine again, and then we were forward, forward, forward, away, and I never saw the end of that fight.

I don't think the Planet won it.

Barret had his daughter in his good arm and had just folded himself over her, cradling her as she wept, rocking her in his arms and I could see his shoulders were shaking. "Shhh, baby girl," he was saying, "shhh, honeychile, shhh, darlin' thang, all safe, all gone, fo' ever, always."

"I'm n-not scared," she choked. "I'm a b-boy and, and I-I'm not s-sca-scared."

When Tifa pulled herself away from the porthole I thought she was going to scream at Cloud again, cracking her knuckles over and over like she did when she was afraid, because she was afraid, because Marls hadn't learnt that calling yourself Dinosaur Wallace and being a boy didn't mean you were incapable; I saw that Reeve had been awake the whole time and simply sitting in his chair, the loco weed giving him a strange waiting look on his face, unmoved by the experience, calm. Tifa cracked her knuckles again as Cloud settled himself in the captain's seat again.

"How do we get through this?" It was a whisper, and it was a plea: it was a plea to the man who had once stood and guided us from the helm of the Highwind with Cid, to the man who had once apparently said 'Let's mosey,' with no sense of irony or shame, to the man who had made the thousand slashes, to her best friend. She hadn't asked him of that, of anything, tried to talk to the old Cloud for a very long time, had lost him a while ago. There was nobody else in the room but him, for her. "Where are are we going, what do we do now?"

"We'll travel to die with Her," said Cloud with quiet faith. "She would have wanted that."

She punched him so hard that she knocked him out cold.


End file.
